


Running Parallel

by emeraldarrows



Category: Time Tunnel
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, American History, Amnesia, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death, Character Study, Could Be Canon, Drama, Extended Scene, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Fantasy, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Heart-Sharing, Historical Fantasy, Historical References, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Loss, Loss of Innocence, Male Friendship, Missing Scene, Mythology References, Occasionally Dark, One Shot Collection, Original Character(s), POV Multiple, POV Original Character, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Reincarnation, Science Fiction, Time Loop, Time Travel, Tragedy, Whump, fallout from Tony having his heart restarted, mild romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-21 04:26:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 45,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9531416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emeraldarrows/pseuds/emeraldarrows
Summary: Does the next day come simply because it does or does it come only because we let go of the day before? The chronicles of a friendship across time and space.





	1. Child of Stone

_"I wept not, so to stone within I grew."-Dante Alighieri_

They're in a shop in 1592 when he sees it, lying on a shelf just out of reach. Prestesiegle, the merchant, takes it down and with the delight of a collector displaying a rare item from his curiosity cabinet, passes it into Doug's hands. He remembers the history faintly, a child of Sens who should have taken it's first breath in 1554 and quietly faded into the pages of history like a thousand others who instead was never born at all, removed in 1582 and sold like an object of art. It's a tiny, perfect infant, a child turned to stone as the years passed, like a human form delicately carved from rock, eyes closed, fingers clasped, a horror and a marvel, hard against the pliable flesh of his hands.

"A lithopedion." Tony says softly, voice almost reverent, as if they're standing around a casket at a funeral. In a way they are, he supposes, a tiny stone casket encasing what should have been a living child, a baby that will never be buried, a thing to be displayed and never rocked or sung lullabies to.

He wonders whether the child thought, whether it dreamed while alive, whether it knew it in the end before it died that it never should have existed at all, a curiosity, flesh to stone, never aging, never changing as decades slipped by and everything around it was altered and rusted by time, an immortality of the cruelest imagination.

It's Tony who takes it from his hand and lays it gently back on the shelf.

oooOOOooo

His eyes cut through the mist-shrouded street to the sign hung over the door, familiar words announcing a place he's seen once, twice, perhaps, even if he can't recall when.

"We've been here before." There's no emotion in his voice, horror, wonder, and any remnant of fear long erased, replaced by a hollow weariness.

Tony doesn't answer. He never does anymore. He used to be the quiet one, he thinks, never Tony. He always knew what to say. But somewhere - he's forgotten where because the places and memories all jumble together now - he stopped speaking.

He starts forward and Tony falls into step behind him.

oooOOOooo

They're with the Donner Party behind the Pass and he thinks once he might have been horrified at the thought, at what he's already seen, if he hadn't seen too much already, centuries and more, and become quite so jaded. Tony sits across from him, head hunched onto his chest, the single blanket wrapped around him.

"It's cold." He says, without a trace of bitterness in it. Tony's head lifts and he inches forward, silently, and spreads the blanket over both of them. They huddle together, leaning against each other in an effort to keep warm. He reaches to tuck the edge of the blanket in and his hand brushes Tony's, frigid, cold flesh against his own. His hand is frail, thin and scarred, and he curls his fingers around it until Tony answers with a faint - too faint these days - whisper of answering pressure. It's all he has in the darkness, that echo that tells him he's still sane, still alive, something that brings back the memories that fade and peel like old paint, stripped away inch by painful inch.

Frozen skin feels hard as stone.

oooOOOooo

Once he finds himself in a psychiatrist's office not too far in the future, a place where a man with a tired face searches his memories and finds _the one_ , feeding it into a machine not unlike the televisions he remembers. He sees it there, stamped across a hundred screens, each one replaying the scene. He sees himself screaming, voiceless, the scarlet staining his palms and face, mingled in with the grime like the morbid strokes of a gothic artist. The bomb exploding as a helicopter falls into the streets of Vietnam. Prayers. Curses. Screams.

He finds him there. He's broken, torn and mangled, shredded like paper dolls in a careless child's hand, and impossibly still alive, eyes flickering, lips bleeding as he tries to speak, as Doug tries to find a place to touch where he won't cause more pain and catches a handful of his sweater. It breaks away, green turned to visceral scarlet. He reaches out and their fingertips touch and hold with the barest pressure, twining, blood running like ink, tears of pain spilling from his eyes as he looks up at him. His eyes stop, frozen in place, breath held and never released. Somebody grabs Doug, tears him away. An American soldier. He fights against him, fights to get back to Tony as the soldier tries to tell him he's dead, shouts at him to leave before he's killed, too. He isn't dead, he wants to say. It's just his sweater is red. He'll wash it, it will be green again. Everything will be fine once the sweater is clean.

Tony falls into step beside him and the psychiatrist switches off the screen with a dull and lifeless click.

oooOOOooo

"You're not here." He whispers once.

Tony looks at him, dark eyes ocean deep, never changing as if they've been carved in through the years. "I know." He says finally and his voice is as he remembers, the same inflections. He should have forgotten the sound of it by now but he hasn't, like phantom pain in a severed limb, an old injury that never fully heals.

"You're dead." The words run together, ripping loose like a scab from an unhealed wound, sending blood spilling across the floor.

There's a long pause and finally Tony's voice comes, so quiet he has to strain to hear. "Does it matter?" He's so quiet, now, like a voice from a rock, the whisper of a living being nearly buried in stone, like the weight of the lithopedion cradled in his hands.

"No." It doesn't after all because insanity means nothing anymore. There's nothing else left, not now, not ever.

oooOOOooo

There's rain falling, running down the walls and splashing against his face in a steady rhythm, spilling in fading patterns in the dimly lighted room. It's cold against his hand, fingers stretched out into the dampness.

"Does it hurt to die?" He asks quietly, with the guileless questioning of a small child trying to comprehend loss, trying to understand grief they aren't even certain how to express.

"Sometimes." Tony's voice is faint now, fading, he thinks. But never gone. He's lying, of course, because it hurts terribly. It must, if living hurts this much.

He reaches out in the darkness and brushes the sleeve of his sweater, the crimson stained into the green like vivid scars. It's solid, like memories, hard as stone, and it burns into his skin, aching like the throb of a bruise. He feels Tony's shoulders lift with the movement of sobbing but he doesn't cry because he's Tony and he's dead and the dead can't cry and it wasn't his heart the Tunnel broke.

So once, when it's raining, and he's alone and not alone, with a ghost or just a memory or nothing at all, Doug cries for both of them.


	2. Butterfly Effect

_"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever." - Carl Sagan_

April 27, 1865

He's seen it a hundred times now, a thousand even. So many times he should know it by heart, have it wrapped around him like a blanket holding out the rain. He should know it, but he never does, as if he's not been here before, as if it's only a dream and nothing more.

If he looks hard he can make out the name on the side of the paddlewheeler, etching itself into his mind, a brand to carry into eternity and whatever it holds.

Sultana.

April 27, 1865

"Somewhere quiet for once." He hears himself say, looking over at his friend.

The last thing he sees is Tony's smile, wide, carefree, the wind ruffling his hair, face turned up into the moonlight.

And then the world explodes into orange and scarlet.

April 27, 1865

He can't see through the black smoke, burning his eyes, burning his throat, threatening to smother him.

"Tony!"

There's a flash of green on the water, at the front of the paddlewheeler. He turns, heedless of the danger, throwing himself off the side of the ship and swimming toward it with all his strength, shouting his name over the cacophony, arm stretching toward him.

Tony's hand disappears beneath the wheel, sinking into the water.

April 27, 1865

It's icy cold, clawing through his bones, burning his hands. He bursts up out of the water, gasping and gagging, desperately gulping air. Around him are the screams of the wounded and dying, a living death, a glimpse into the inferno of Dante's nightmares.

He stretches out his hand and a stranger's closes over it.

April 27, 1865

The water has grown quiet now, almost tranquil. No more have been found clinging to trees and wreckage, not another man has been lifted up to life.

As far as he can see there's a blanket of corpses upon the water, floating dead men resting gently, borne by the lapping of the river against the side of the Bostonia II.

"Poor devils." One of the crew breathes, drawing his hand across his chest, forehead to center. The mark of the cross, a shield against evil.

He looks down at his hands, streaked with crimson, splashing scarlet droplets on the wet deck.

He doesn't know if it's his blood or Tony's. Maybe it doesn't even matter. Maybe it's both the same.

April 27, 1865

"It was a terrible tragedy." The doctor says gently. "But you survived. You have the rest of your life ahead of you to forget that one day."

His forehead is pressed to the cold windowpane, eyes vacant. His hands fall open at his sides, palms upwards.

_Tragedy._

One day.

Rest of your life.

Tony.

April 27, 1865

Sometimes there are echoes in the darkness, voices calling his name, whispers through unopened rooms and silent corridors.

_Stop saying his name. Accept it and move out of the day._

"Tony."

His hand slips beneath the wheel and is gone.

April 27, 1865

He's a young doctor, new here today.

He looks in at the figure behind the glass, a huddled form, legs drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around his knees, dark head resting on them. His suit is threadbare and stained, shoes scuffed. Only the faintest movement of his back as he breathes marks the man as alive. He's seen many such men here, ones who have been cruelly mistreated by life, broken beyond the point of human endurance. But he's never seen one so hopeless.

"How long has he been here?"

The man at the desk doesn't glance his way, his only indication of hearing a quick tap to push his spectacles higher on his nose.

"Since this morning."

"But his clothes..everything looks so worn."

He gives a careless shrug.

"Since this morning."

April 27, 1865

His life is snatches, a wheel of quiet regrets, lost memories. He reaches as Tony's hand slips beneath the water and is gone.

"What I wouldn't give...."

"...do anything for you."

It's icy cold and he hunches his shoulders against the darkness, against the reflection of fire on the water, burning for burning.

_"Do you think if you wish hard enough you can relive a moment, even a whole day?"_

"Would you want to?"

January 10, 1989

"What do these mean?"

Ann's head lifts from her work, gaze resting on the computer screen with the two lines, one just beneath the other. The first is still, a ruffled line stretching silently from edge to edge. The second flickers slightly, darting above before returning to it's place.

"Signals." Her voice is inscrutable.

"They look so primitive." The girl shakes her head. "Why do they keep this old equipment?"

"Those signals monitored the first time travelers." Ann's eyes caress the lines, wrapping herself in them like a shroud. "Doug Phillips and Tony Newman. They entered the Tunnel in 1968."

"When did they come back?"

There's silence for a long moment, hanging in the air between them, thick, filled with countless unspoken words. When Ann speaks her tone is just above a whisper.

"They didn't."

For the first time the girl's face registers sorrow. "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. MacGregor. They were...killed?"

The second line darts forward, then quickly falls back.

"No. They're both still alive."

"Then why haven't they been brought back?" The girl stares at the lines. "We've done it many times now. It would take only a second."

"They fell into a time loop. The same day repeated over and over. April 27, 1865. Everyday Tony dies. Everyday Doug tries to save him. He won't let the day go until he has and until then we can't retrieve them."

The girl looks back at the screen, at the signals wandering across the screen like lost souls seeking something.

"And if he never does?"

Ann reaches out a hand and gently brushes the signals.

"Then somewhere it's April 27, 1865 forever."


	3. Flesh and Blood

_"This day it had goldness in the upstairs. As I know when I looked at it my eyes hurt. After I look at it the cellar is red."-Richard Matheson, "Born Of Man And Woman"_

_Don't speak._

He lost him for six days.

Six days in which _they'd_ had time to take Tony, to strap him down and inject drugs into his bloodstream _not enough to kill him, they'd been careful of that_ , and paralyze him with a laser beam _not enough to put him under, only to make him immobile while they worked_. Six days where they'd rewired a human being into a sacrilege of flesh and blood, a lifeless shell of metal and bone.

He didn't even know who _they_ were besides the guard who'd broken his neck when he hit him, the others having left long before he ever arrived. He didn't know why they'd done it, why they'd taken Tony and not another, why they'd destroyed him.

_Don't cry._

He'd found him there, in the laboratory, standing in front of the computers. He'd spoken his name, reached out and touched him. But Tony had turned away from him and he'd seen his back, the wires and metal implanted within the skin and bone, threaded through muscle and nerves, every cell in his body tuned to the hideous plate of artificial humanity.

He hadn't had time to register the emotions of shock and horror, only the sickening taste that surged up in his throat as he choked, holding it back. He hadn't even been able to fully comprehend what they'd done to his friend before Tony had turned back and calmly, so calmly, put his hands around Doug's throat.

He was stronger than Tony, always had been. It wasn't hard to break the hands free and land a punch to his jaw. Tony had landed in a crumpled heap against the computer, body jerking as the electricity tore through him. Somehow Doug grabbed him and ripped him away, caught him and lowered him to the ground.

He doesn't know long he knelt there, holding him, fluid from the single ruptured wire bleeding on his hand, blood trickling from the skin he'd torn on his knuckles when he'd hit Tony, the two of them and not another living soul, the silence so oppressive he could feel every second slice into his chest, cutting through his lungs. And then he'd gathered Tony up into his arms and walked away.

_Don't feel._

He keeps Tony in a special room of the house he bought. Doug has a job with a military laboratory now, one so like his former job that he can't help but see the irony of it all. They're only fifteen years into the future and two cities away from Project Tic-Toc, and he thinks that one day he might be out walking and bump into Ann or one of the others. There would be no need to say anything because fifteen years ago, in another time, another place, they already know.

He takes care of Tony.

The shock and damaged wire has made him docile, responsive to commands that he carries out without questioning. Doug has to lock him in the room when he's gone in case the radio signals he hears constantly in his mind mention suicide and he throws himself off the roof.

He's gotten away from him only once, the once he took him to a discreet doctor who examined him and asked no questions. Somehow while the doctor's back was turned Tony slipped past him and out the door. Doug found him sitting on the fourth story fire escape, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. Goosebumps had stood out on his bare skin but he hadn't shivered, unable to feel cold or heat since that day. Doug had led him back with little effort, standing stoically, a hand wrapped around Tony's wrist as the doctor sadly shook his head and told him he could do nothing.

He'd already known the answer.

_Doesn't hurt._

Some days he wants to rip the circuits from his skin, tear them out piece by piece, and see if Tony is still in there, buried beneath the twisted wires and the hollow metallic flash of his eyes, the eyes he can't bear to look at anymore. But he can't. Because the circuits that they implanted into his back are as much a part of him as his heart and his lungs, every tiny bit of light and metal interwoven with flesh and blood, and he doesn't know if the slightest twist, the smallest tangle in those wires could snuff out all his other organs like a candle in a breath of wind.

In the cruelest mockery of all, Tony's body still behaves much like a human's. He eats and drinks - but only when Doug orders him to, falls asleep every sixteen hours - to the second, and every once in a while he even blinks, lashes opening and closing like the snap of a metronome over unsearchable eyes. Somewhere inside his chest, between flesh and metal, two lungs still draw in air with the timed regularity of a machine, a heart still beats out a pulse, an empty rhythm. Bones still rest beneath the layers of skin and muscles and now useless nerves.

But he doesn't speak, doesn't utter a sound. If they'd implanted a voice within the circuits it was never switched on, or perhaps, Doug wonders, whether it was the severed wire, the one he can't find a function for, a twisted metal thread that silently whispers meaningless words in darkness.

_Don't scream._

He holds him, sometimes, the way he used to when Tony was hurting and injured, all those times when they'd been miles from care and he could do so little for him. He'd learned then, sensed in a way, that Tony needed touch, craved it like flowers need the sun, as if some long buried memory of his parents' love only surfaced in times of pain, that there was a hunger to cling to something to block out the loneliness.

He holds him like he'd held the child Tony had been at Pearl Harbor, speaks quietly to him, words like an adult soothing an infant. He doesn't know if he understands, only that Tony seems to respond to the comfort, that the only time he seems like Tony, the fiery, devil-may-care Tony he once was, is at those times.

But Doug can't look into his eyes because he can see it all in those moments, a thousand tears and a million voiceless screams buried inside the blackness, a hundred questions he can never answer, Tony trying to claw his way out and failing, tumbling back down into the darkness, deeper by the day, while he begs for a way out he can't find, cries and pleads within his eyes, flesh and blood against the metal in his spine.

And for all the commands Doug can give him, the simple, vapid words that tell him to eat, to drink, to brush his teeth, he can't make himself say the one he should, the command that sticks in his throat and tears him up inside, the command he can't even give himself. He can't say it because it would hurt too much, rip him wide open and let the rage spill out, the blinding anger at whoever and whatever allowed this to happen, and the desperation he feels when he knows he can do nothing to change what's been done, to make it better. So he says nothing for fear he'll open his mouth and say the words.

The words that command Tony to scream.


	4. Till Human Voices Wake Us

_"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown."-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock_

"Sometimes I think I died there." He spreads his hands on the table, palms down, nails biting into the rough wood, the splinters pricking his skin. It doesn't hurt. Pain no longer registers in his mind beyond the slightest tingle, a faint echo of what would once have been unbearable. Like so much else that part of him has been scraped away.

His life is like writing in dust, his face a reflection in the mirror, the surface cold beneath his hand, the imprint of his fingers lingering after he pulls away before vanishing entirely. Death would be like that, he supposes, life out of reach and fading, lost like his past.

He was someone once, living and breathing, someone who must have had a life, friends, perhaps even a family. He's stolen this life from that man, stepped into his shoes and his skin, a replacement and not the man himself. It's deep in his bones, clawing at him, a gnawing sense of all he's forgotten, that it's important, that it matters, but he can't remember why.

"They say dying is only like going to sleep." Another soldier says, voice thoughtful as he chews on the wad of tobacco tucked in his cheek.

"Is he true?" His fingers skim the surface of the table, like a water insect darting across a pond, not sensing any danger lurking beneath, the fish that lunge upward and the snakes with open mouths.

The man shrugs and spits a stream of brown liquid. "I've never died before."

oooOOOooo

"I shouldn't be alive." He says, voice steady and determined, because he is alive and it should mean something, it should make sense. They pulled him from the wreckage and carnage of battle two days after it ended, barely breathing but still clinging to life, tucked beneath a cave's ledge that saved him. Even then he'd been broken all over, brain injured almost as badly as his body. The man in the hospital had taken the worst of it, his body acting as a shield, rather intentionally or by the roll of some dice in fate's hands. He doesn't even know the man, the chalky face beneath the widow's peak that dips at his hairline, the few strands of grey just catching his temples belonging to a stranger.

He comes to see him sometimes, sits beside him as the light filters through the window and curls into patterns across the motionless form, shadows twisting into movement he mistakes for awareness. There's never anything but the slow, steady breathing, no response to voice or the care given. He thinks perhaps the man he used to be would be devastated, waiting and hoping at the bedside. So he comes out of duty to that man, like visiting and tending the grave of an ancestor who died before he was born, a thin thread of connection and nothing more.

He owes it to whoever he once was, the man who died at Gettysburg and left him in his place.

oooOOOooo

"I'm still forgetting, you know." He tells the pale face. It's the same everyday, a bit of him whittled away, stripped like a strand of DNA from his skin, torn out leaving him bleeding. Everyday he forgets a little more, something that made sense yesterday, a word, a flashed image quickly gone, they're all being stolen from him, drained like water from the bottom of a well. There's no pain and it seems wrong because it should hurt to have yourself, who you were, cut away.

The man doesn't answer, of course. He's been unconscious since they carried them both in. He may wake up, the doctors say, but their faces are grim and he knows they're only being optimistic. The odds are the man will never open his eyes again.

"You knew me, didn't you?" He asks, but there's not even a twitch in the still face. The stranger's fingers are cold when he closes his hand over them, squeezes lightly.

Whoever this man is he saved his life. Whoever he is he must have cared about him, once, and like everything else, he's forgotten.

oooOOOooo

"I have dreams." He says, haltingly. "I see things, strange things."

There are lights and colors in his dreams, swirling violently, ripping through him and tearing him apart inside. There are words in the midst of it, "fix" and "tunnel", meaningless and vapid syllables that make his head ache. There's pain and shouting, explosions and blood staining his hands, and once even an image of himself, head bent over a man lying still and white. He can't see the man's face but he can see his own, frozen and lost in grief, unable to move. He should remember the man, the brother, the friend he lost, but he can't, resurfacing empty and hollow with each attempt.

The doctor lifts his head and looks up at him. "Dreams mean nothing."

oooOOOooo

"I don't remember anything." His voice is heavy with grief. He's in mourning, he thinks. It seems wrong not to grieve for all he's lost, all he should have.

"It may be better that way." The doctor says, not unkindly, but with the weariness of repetition, of one who's seen too many men far worse than him, wounded in body and soul and unable to ever go home. "The war was a terrible thing. Thank God it's over, and count yourself lucky you survived."

He didn't survive, he thinks. He died then and just can't remember how.

oooOOOooo

"I know things that will happen." He whispers to the room. He doesn't tell the doctor this time because they'd only put him in the hospital or in a narrow room, give him medicine and treatment. But he does know, like knowing the sun will come up, and it leaves him with a feeling of dread when Lincoln's death appears in the newspaper clenched in his fist or the Sultana sinks and he _knew_ , somewhere in the part of whoever he was, whatever piece of that man endures, that all this and more would happen. He can't prevent it, or do anything about it because he never seems to know he knew until it happens, a horrible feeling of deja vu winding around him like a snake, and even if he could tell them they'd never believe him anyway.

He's lived before, he thinks, like the reincarnation people believe in, been two men and not only one. The one he was, the one who died, must have known all these things. But he's not that man anymore.

oooOOOooo

He moves on, eventually.

It's a job first, then a wife, and finally a home. A year later there's a baby, and when he takes his son in his arms for the first time and his wife asks him what he'd like him named he calls him Douglas. It's a good and solid name, and he searches for where he first heard it. But he doesn't remember, not the war or who he was before, not the man in the hospital bed or the words and images in his dreams, nor why his son is named Douglas when he can never recall knowing anyone with the name. That part of him is dead and buried, lost forever, and irretrievable. And he thinks perhaps it's better that way.

He should remember, shouldn't he, if it was truly that important?


	5. Secure the Shadow

_"Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade." - Victorian saying_

She was only a little ways from it, so close she could taste it in her mouth like the Challah Mama made for Shabbat, the statue so small across the water it seemed she could take it in her hand and pull it to her.

She curled her toes around the edge, spread her arms, wide and outstretched like eagle's wings. Her eyes closed, face tilting upward to capture the imprint of the sunlight and wind against her skin, the breath of a new world and the hope it might have held.

And then she jumped, a flutter of fabric against a blue canvas of sky that went on forever, the waves catching her with waiting arms, closing over her head.

There was an odd sort of caress in the water as it reached out with a sympathetic hand and gently brushed away the chalk marks from her coat.

oooOOOooo

_"They put a chalk 'X' on the back of her coat. The Xs were put aside to see whether they had to be reexamined or deported. If they deported my sister we couldn't let her go. Where would she go if they deported her? Some kind man, I don't know who he was, told my sister to turn her coat around. She had a nice plush coat with a silk lining, and they turned her coat around." - Victoria Saifatti Fernández, 1916, Macedonian immigrant_

He gasped by reflex as he slammed into the river, water pouring into his lungs.

"Tony!"

He couldn't breathe, struggling against the water. He wasn't even sure which way was up.

"Give me your hand!"

He pushed his arms above his head with all his strength, thrusting his hands above the water desperately. A set of strong hands folded around one wrist, yanking him upwards. The hands slid to his sweater, grabbing the fabric and hauling him over the side of the boat to safety.

He gasped in air, coughed, doubled over, and returned half of the bay to it's proper location.

Doug stripped off his suit jacket and draped it around Tony's shoulders, laying a hand on his back.

"Are you hurt?"

He gagged out more water and shook his head, sending droplets flying, shivering violently.

"Here." A tall man with hair peeking from beneath his cap and a trunk by his side, pulled off his own coat and held it out. "Wrap yourself in this, man. You're soaked to the bone." 

"Thank you." Doug spread it around Tony and looked up at the stranger. "Where is this?"

The man gave him an odd look. "Why, it's Ellis Island, sir. The Island of Tears between the Old World and the New. Hadn't you knowledge of where you were going?"

"Not enough, I'm afraid." He helped Tony to his feet and extended his hand. "I'm Doug Phillips and this is my friend Tony Newman. We're....travelers."

The man shook his hand with a warm smile. "Gus Sherman, mourning photographer."

"Mourning?" Tony's teeth chattered as he pulled the coat closed.

"Photographs of the deceased." He opened his trunk, selected two daguerreotypes and held them out. The first was an infant, tiny mouth and cheeks gently painted to give them color, looking almost asleep against the white pillow. The second a living boy, hand on his twin's shoulder, the dead child propped up against him.

A muscle jumped in Tony's jaw and Doug glanced away.

"You find it morbid." Gus said quietly.

"I suppose it's a little...unsettling."

A faint smile touched his face as he took the photographs back.

"At times I think as you. I look at the boy and I wonder, when he looks at this image will he remember his brother as one who laughed and played with him? Or will he only think how cold and stiff he was, how he hated being forced to touch him and feel his death as if he shared it?" He tenderly rubbed a thumb across the dead child's face. "You have heard it said 'secure the shadow ere the substance fade'. Their memories will fade as years pass. But this, the face of the child will not be forgotten. It will remain inside this image."

He touched the infant, fingers brushing the fabric of the gown as if feeling the softness of the material against his skin.

"There must be some reason why this brief life was placed here. As long as we wonder the reason this photograph should remain to give some testimony to her, so others may look at how carefully they dressed and washed her, how gently she was laid although she could not feel, all these things bearing witness to the love they gave her. It does not matter that she was only six months old when she died. Some may live sixty years and never know love. To know it for six months is a precious gift, and others, I hope, may realize it when they look at this photograph. After I am gone it will still be here so that others do not forget how fragile life and love are."

His face brightened. "Ah, but now is not the time for deep and sad thoughts. We are in America! It is a day for joy. Isaac, Marta, come."

A man with a child of three by the hand came forward. The little girl gave Tony a shy smile, hopping toward him, left leg dragging slightly as she stepped.

"My friends and two of my fellow passengers. Isaac Beychok and his little daughter Marta. And these somewhat wet travelers are Doug and Tony."

The older man smiled warmly and Marta looked curiously up at them, peeking from behind her fingers. Tony smiled down at her and she took a cautious step forward, carefully poking the hem of Tony's sweater.

"You like green?"

She giggled, fingers returning to hide her eyes. He flipped one of her blonde curls and winked at her.

There was a frenzy of noise behind them and Gus turned. "Come, my friends. It is time we saw more of this wonderful new land."

oooOOOooo

They walked up the Grand Staircase beneath the spread American flags, moving among a sea of faces and a cacophony of voices, each speaking in a strange language. Everywhere they turned the people were different, every color of skin from dark to fair, every form of dress, every station in life from wealthy to steerage, the healthy and strong to the sickly and fragile. Some wore crosses around their necks, other crucifixes, others stars of David. All walked together as one body toward the line of doctors at the top of the stairs.

They reached the top, Doug first in line.

The doctor looked down through his glasses and started firing the questions, waiting only long enough for a short answer.

"Is there anyone who came to meet you at Ellis Island? Do you have a job waiting for you in America?"

Doug only shook his head.

The doctor glanced up at Tony. "Italian?"

"On my mother's side."

He gave an uncaring nod and printed the nationality on the paper.

Another turned to Isaac as he read through a Bible passage in his own language.

"Do you have money?"

"No money." Isaac held his hands outward. "But I work hard. I find work."

The doctor pushed his glasses up on his nose and scribbled a note on the paper.

A nurse combed through Gus's hair, checking for lice, then pulled out a buttonhook to look beneath his eyelids for trachoma.

"Do you have a destination in America?"

"Not yet. But I have money and I will work."

Another scratch on his paper and the doctor waved him to one line.

Finally a doctor reached for Marta.

Marta's eyes went wide with utter horror, screaming as she flung herself at her father.

"Uniforms make her think of soldiers." Isaac held her against him, face set in a mask of pain. "Soldiers that kill her mother, my wife."

Tony's jaw clenched.

The doctor glanced at her bad leg and drew a circled L on her coat with a quick sweep of his hand. "Send them all to be detained."

oooOOOooo

"Most immigrants stayed here five days to a week." Tony crossed his arms, leaning against the wall of the infirmary. "Some recovered enough to go on, others didn't. Some were deported without illness, simply for being Italian, Slavic, or Jewish."

"And the crippled?" Doug cast a pointed glance at Marta, watching the child sitting on the ground, playing with a rag doll and happily chattering away in her native language.

Tony looked away. "Usually deported."

"To keep a child out of the country for being crippled.." He shook his head.

"It's the rule in case the cause is a tubercular hip." Marta darted forward, throwing her arms around Tony's legs. He tossed her up in the air and caught her as she laughed. "In her case it's only a birth defect. One leg is shorter than the other." He set her down and she ran back to her doll.

"Then why on earth would they deport her?"

"The Commissoner of Immigration believed in Eugenics." Tony's voice was quiet, something strange in his eyes that Doug recognized. He remembers Pearl Harbor and his father's death, killed in the bombings by the Japanese who practiced that very thought, that races and weaker members of the human race are inferior and therefore not fit to live, a concept transferred from the slaughter of the Sino-Japanese War into the hands of the Third Reich.

His eyes shifted to Marta, vibrant and full of life. "Sometimes I don't understand people."

"Neither do I."

oooOOOooo

It started with Marta running a slight fever that quickly turned into chills. It wasn't a warm room, with few covers, and they only thought she'd caught a cold. But within hours she was shaking, whole body jerking with convulsions.

Tony went for a doctor but he only looked at her, shook his head, and left a pile of blankets and a bucket of water beside the bed.

Tony and Doug traded off sponge-bathing Marta while Isaac held her as she convulsed.

Two hours later three more children and an adult were down with the fever, four others on the verge.

"It's an epidemic." Gus said, half under his breath. "They've locked the doors on us."

Marta went rigid in a convulsion and Tony crawled up on the bed beside her, helping her father hold her. Her tiny hands tangled in his sweater, knuckles white. He wiped a hand across his forehead.

Somewhere across the room a mother started weeping, rocking a dead infant against her.

Marta twitched once, hand spasming, before going still. Doug felt for a pulse, then bent his head over the child's mouth before laying his ear against her chest.

"Doug?" Tony whispered hoarsely. There was silence for a long moment as Doug slowly lifted his head from the child's chest, staring out into space before answering.

"It's no use, Tony. She's gone."

There was a blinding rush of heat that exploded behind Tony's eyes, a kaleidoscope of colors swirling inside a black void, with no time to speak or even reach out a hand.

Doug caught him the instant before he crumpled to the floor.

oooOOOooo

_He drowned in the darkness, the water closing over his head. His chest pounded, heart slamming like the jolt of electricity running through it, every nerve shaking with it._

He was burning hot and icy cold, hands reaching for someone in the darkness, weeping, crying out, but no one answered.

There were children, lifeless and cold, standing all around him, sepiatone faces sobbing, hands reaching to him in a plea for help, for mercy.

"Doug, help me! Doug!"

He was lost, turning down corridor after corridor, stumbling over the dead children, feeling them snatch at his clothes. Marta was among them, plucking at the green fabric, crying for her father. He tried to pick her up but she crumbled, fragile paper turning into dust.

And then he was on fire, mouth paralyzed, unable to scream as the flame licked at his clothes, consuming the green and turning it black as night.

oooOOOooo

"How is he?"

He laid a hand against Tony's forehead. "Burning up."

"The fever?"

"Yes."

Gus spit out a curse. "They keep us in here like rats, waiting for us to die, the healthy and sick together. That child would not have died if only they had let her through. And now Tony, too. He will die just like her."

Doug stripped off his shirt and dipped it in the water bucket, using it to sponge Tony's forehead.

"He's not going to die, Gus. He's a fighter. He'll make it."

"I have seen this sickness before." Gus tucked the covers in around him. "The fever goes higher and higher until they convulse, even the strongest of their bones breaking with the force. They shake until they die."

"We'll keep the fever down." He tugged the sweater over Tony's head, lowering the limp body back against the pillow, sponging water across his chest and arms. "Gus, get me more water. As cool as you can find. And more blankets for when the fever breaks. Pound on the door until they answer, break it down if you have to. But get cold water."

Gus took the bucket and looked down at Tony's drawn face, features wan with exhaustion. "Pray, Doug." He says quietly. "Pray that no more fall ill. Pray that some of us survive and we might save his life. But if not...pray for a quick and merciful death for him and that he does not linger. No one should suffer like that." His face pinched. "No one."

oooOOOooo

Two more died in the night. Isaac fell ill somewhere in the midst of it, and the few still strong and well went from bed to bed, bathing as the fevers spiked, supporting the dying as they shook their lives away.

Isaac was gone by afternoon, only a single convulsion quickly ending his life. A merciful death as Gus had prayed for as the man worsened.

Broth was sent down from the kitchen, and Gus and Doug worked to spoon any they could down the sick. Few could take more than a few sips.

Despite the constant bathing Tony's fever continued to climb. By the next evening he was beginning to shake with the early tremors of the convulsions. Doug held him against them, bracing him with all his strength to keep the bones from shattering. Tony whimpered, curling against him as he called for his father, to spectral memories Doug couldn't summon.

Somewhere in the room, Gus prayed as another man died. A toddler, newly orphaned and unattended, wandered over to the trunk and opened it, tugging at the photographs and strewing them across the floor, the faces of the dead spread across the ground like a carpet for the dying.

No one went to pick them up.

oooOOOooo

The first cracks of dawn were filtering through the window when Doug opened his eyes and discovered that the room was quiet, not echoing with rattled breathing.

Around him, some slept, turning their heads in dreams, fevers broken. Others lay still, having passed away in the night. Through the open door he saw Gus sleeping upright in a chair.

He didn't want to cross to the bed but he did so anyway, lifting the limp wrist and pressing two fingers to the vein.

The answering pulse was still weak, but steady, and the hand in his cool. He tucked it back under the blanket and Tony's eyes blinked open.

"Welcome back." He gave a full and rare smile, so wide his skin hurt. Tony managed a frail one.

"What happened?" His voice was hoarse.

"The fever. You've been sick but you're going to be fine."

"Isaac?" He whispered.

A shadow passed through Doug's eyes. "He didn't make it, Tony." He doesn't say how close Tony came, of the hours spent waiting, listening to each painful breath. Pain creased Tony's face.

"Gus?"

"The next room, sleeping. He never came down with it."

Tony's eyes blinked and he fought against sleep.

"You all right?" It was just above a whisper but Doug heard it.

"I'm fine."

His eyes fell closed as he drifted off. Doug reached out and brushed back a limp and sweat-soaked strand of hair.

"We both are."

oooOOOooo

It was three days later when they were released, Tony pale and frail but alive, leaning against Doug as they left the infirmary and stepped out into the sunlight.

Across the harbor the Statue of Liberty stood, lamp lifted high above the suffering, shining across the water.

"Where will you go, Gus?"

He tilted his head, watching a family of four walk past. "I think I will take photographs of the people here, the immigrants, to capture their faith and spirit. To secure their shadows so others may remember."

Gus lifted his trunk and looked over at the travelers.

"You will be well, my friends?"

Doug extended his hand. "Fine. Best of luck to you, Gus."

The man gave him a smile, clasped the hand firmly and shook it. "God go with you both." He pulled the blanket up on Tony's shoulders. "And you keep warm until you are strong."

He whistled a tune as he started away, a spring in his steps, head held high.

"More than 3,500 people died over the years at Ellis Island, Doug." Tony said quietly, voice stronger but still weak, infused with sorrow. "Hundreds more were deported back to their country. And yet they kept on coming here. I've always wondered what gave them that courage."

Doug's eyes searched across the water, to the lamp lighting the path, the distant horizon that beckoned. When he spoke, his voice was quiet.

"Hope." He said.


	6. The Way of the River

_"The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise." - Mark Twain_

There was something in the air Doug didn't like.

He couldn't put his finger on what it was, only that it was too still. Nothing was happening. Not even a bird sang in the moss-laden trees surrounding them, and they'd traveled almost a mile without seeing an animal of any kind. If Tony had noticed he gave no indication, walking along the riverbank, pulling at moss as they went.

"It's too quiet."

Tony picked up a stone and tossed it at the river, watching it skip twice across the glassy surface.

"Cheer up. Maybe the Lusitania is just around the bend."

Doug shot him a look as Tony grinned, bent over, and splashed water at him.

"Hey!" He reached down for a handful to throw back at him.

It happened so quickly he didn't have time to shout out a warning, even as he felt it in his bones, clawing like a wild animal, seeking, searching.

One minute they were splashing on the bank and the next there was a roar like a hungry creature, a sound that sent a cold chill down Doug's back. He looked in time to see the wall of water bearing down on them, as both of them started to swim, to struggle for higher ground as the water wrapped around their ankles, chaining them like shackles. He flung out his arm and caught a handful of Tony's sweater, knotting his fingers in the fabric as he reached out with his free hand and wrapped it around a tree limb as the wall exploded.

"Hold on!" The wind tore his voice away.

For an instant he saw Tony's eyes, dark as midnight in his face, staring at him, eyes as deep as a man looking into all eternity.

There was a sickening rip of fabric, louder than a clap of thunder, as Tony's sweater tore. Like a monster's hand the water scooped Tony up, taking him away from the shore, the air, and Doug. He made a desperate grab for him but the water dragged him downstream and under.

"Tony!!!!"

The water was empty as far as his eyes could see. No waving hands, head bobbing, no sign of life of any kind. His eyes fell to his hand and the tattered piece of green sweater still clenched in his fist, twisted between white knuckles, the only tangible proof that his friend had ever existed at all.

He stared at it for a full minute.

And then the tears came.

oooOOOooo

He didn't know how long he sat there. He couldn't seem to get to his feet, to crawl back from his fetal position at the base of the tree, or to uncurl his hand from the scrap of Tony's sweater. He couldn't even open his eyes because he knew then that he'd have to face the truth, that it wasn't a dream, and that Tony was gone.

They'd survived before, so many times, together, survived against impossible odds. There was the time in the Civil War when he'd thought he'd lost him, searching his face for signs of life and finding none. He'd come back from that, wearing the enemy's uniform, not even knowing his own name, but alive. He had considered it a miracle, a precious gift.

And now Tony was gone, ripped away in a senseless and sudden moment. They didn't even know where they were or what was happening. It couldn't have happened like this.

Somehow he got upright, tucking the bit of cloth into his pocket and dragging a hand over his face. Like an aged man he started forward toward the rushing water where Tony had been swept downstream.

He didn't know where he was going and he didn't care. He simply followed the path of the river, looking out across the roaring waters as he stayed on the high ground, ignoring the water lapping at his ankles. Here and there he saw bits of cloth, baskets, a child's doll snagged on branches sticking out of the water.

He stumbled once and steadied himself, moving forward. And then he saw a building up ahead.

His breath caught.

It was a church, submerged in water up to the stained-glass windows, door open as if welcoming him inside. Beaten by the elements, the building stood undamaged, exquisite beauty in the face of horror.

There was light glinting from the church windows across the water, like a lighthouse beacon piercing the darkness. Without even knowing why, he followed the light, searching across the depths.

He saw something.

It was little more than a flash, a sight of a head bobbing up, then down. But he would have recognized that face anywhere.

"Tony!"

He flung himself toward the water, grabbing the nearest tree and reaching out into the water.

"Tony!"

He felt something then, cold skin against his, and grabbed but it slipped out of his grasp. He could have sobbed in frustration.

He looked down at the water. There wasn't time to think, to know the risk. He let go of the tree limb, feeling the water yank at him, threatening to drag him under.

He jerked both hands into the last place he'd felt Tony. His fingers brushed something and he grasped at it with all his strength. Then Tony's face, pale, eyes closed, broke the surface, and he fell backwards, pulling him with him, onto dry land.

oooOOOooo

He tried to remember what little he'd learned of CPR. It had hardly seemed important at the time, not for a scientist who spent most of his time in an underground bunker, but now he'd have sold his soul to go back and learn it. He'd been doing all he remembered for almost a minute and Tony still wasn't breathing.

He bent forward and forced another breath into his friend's lungs. He'd gotten all the water out, as far as he could tell, but Tony was ice cold, a blue tinge framing his mouth. The olive tone of his skin was gone, replaced by a clammy white as pale as milk.

He gave another breath, head spinning with the effort of sharing his oxygen. He shook it off, forcing his eyes to focus on the artificial rise of his friend's chest, pausing long enough to rest a hand across his chest. The heart was still beating, a slow and struggling pulse beneath the skin. As long as the heart beat there was still hope. He tried to remember something about drowning victims and failed. It was Tony who retained that sort of knowledge, seemingly useless and yet so vital. His hand shook as he wiped sweat off his forehead.

Another breath, and Tony still wasn't responding. The heartbeat was sluggish. He paused long enough to catch his breath and continued, chest pounding, a rarely uttered prayer forming in his mind. _Let him live and I'll do anything..._

There was a sudden twitch as Tony jerked, coughed, and started gagging. Doug rocked back on his heels as the ragged gasps for air eased into rapid but normal breathing. Tony's eyes fluttered open, the deep black stark against the pale skin.

Doug held out his hand and waited until Tony placed his in it and faintly squeezed around the coughing fit. "Come on. We'd better get to higher ground."

oooOOOooo

They made their way up the river bank, past strewn wreckage of lives and homes. Tony was too weak to make it more than a few yards before his knees buckled, and Doug heaved him up on his back and continued on, picking his way over the branches and debris.

He didn't know how far they traveled, Tony dead weight, his arms numb from the effort of supporting him, legs trembling. Branches caught at him, breaking skin and tearing fabric. Everywhere there was water, and as he moved he found himself wading through it, up to his waist in places, filthy and mud-brown. He thought it was night but he couldn't see the stars. He hitched Tony higher on his back and pressed on, forcing himself beyond the end of his strength.

He saw light up ahead, lanterns in the darkness, and stumbled forward. Tony roused slightly, head lifting as they entered the refugee camp, a makeshift line of tents and somewhat dry ground teeming with shivering and lost people. He heard sounds swirl around them, the weeping of a man who'd lost his family, the wail of an infant as the mother hummed a lullaby, a coughing child soothed by an elderly woman.

A stranger handed them crackers and water. He took only a bite and a few swallows and passed it on to Tony who managed little better before slumping over against Doug, at the end of his strength. He gathered him up again, shrugging off a man's offer to help carry him.

Unsteady with exhaustion, Doug only remembered laying Tony on the ground and curling up beside him, huddled side by side to keep each other warm and alive.

He woke up a few times across the night, reaching out in the darkness to lay a palm on Tony's chest and feel the steady rise and fall of life, before drifting back into an uneasy sleep. When he awoke the last time it was to Tony shaking his arm. There a blanket spread over him, another wrapped around Tony. The color had returned to his face, his strength back. His dark eyes were watching something just out of Doug's vision.

"Doug, look." Tony's voice was hushed, filled with a faint sense of awe. He followed his pointing hand.

Across the horizon, rising slowly, were fingers of color, pale streaks filling the sky, a sunrise more beautiful than he'd ever seen. In the distance he thought he saw the church, shining comfort across the waters.

"It's over." Tony said quietly. "It's dawn at last."

Doug didn't reply. There were no words left to say.


	7. Time-lapse

_"Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow." - Antonio Porchia_

He sees the other's eyes in the swirls of color and light, the blinding rush of centuries before and behind them.

He knows what has happened, a miscalculation, an error in judgement, and they've drifted apart, lost each other in the transition.

They're too far apart for him to reach for the other and even holding onto him won't keep him there. What's done is done.

They're thrown one way and then the next, the one pushed forward, the other back.

He hasn't the breath to scream out a warning, to scream in anger, in desperation.

He wants to beg him to close the gap, to change what's about to happen, even as he knows he can't. They're only a breath apart, an eyelash that could represent a hundred thousand years of human history, days through which both could pass and never meet.

The other turns his head toward him, attempting to speak, words ripped away and echoing a decade behind them.

It happens so slowly he can see it all, feel every fraction of the second, each one an hour.

Black meets black as their eyes touch and hold an instant across time, memories of a friendship, an experiment, a life in another place, shared knowledge that keeps them sane, that keeps them alive in the constant shifts and jumps through countless moments.

The last look is a goodbye, and he knows it.

And then in the instant before he closes his eyes he feels the other disappear.

His eyes are still closed when he lands, the heat of a strange desert burning into his eyelids, searing hot tears against the corneas.

His hand reaches out in the blinding light through his lids, feels the hot and empty sand around him, a thousand grains scalding his skin.

He doesn't want to open his eyes, to see Indians and cowboys, soldiers on horseback, or a thousand other things. But above it all there's one thing he doesn't want to see.

When he finally opens his eyes and stares into the world he doesn't know the year, the date, or the hour. He doesn't even know the place or the circumstances that's he's been thrown into. But he knows one thing, a single fact that rips into him like the Civil War bullet that temporarily ended his life that one time. It's a knowledge that cuts through him and leaves him hollow inside.

For the first time, he's alone.


	8. Smoke and Mirrors

_"I began to feel as though the world was coming to an end. I guess I was a bit hazy. Anyway, the next thing I remember I was out on the street..... I went back to the building and helped with the rescue work until we were ordered to stop while a search was made for dynamite."-O.H. Buck, May 18, 1927_

_"She evokes the same awe, horror and pity as do schizophrenics who often combine deep, true insight with utter helplessness, and who retreat into madness."-Schein, on the myth of Cassandra_

There's an old house on the way home from school, abandoned since before I was born until six months ago. There's a man who lives there now, a strange sort of person, everyone says, but then again, Bath is such a small town that any outsider can seem strange. I don't think he's strange, though, just alone.

I call him Mr. Cassandra. If he has a real name, no one has ever heard it or bothers to use it. He sees me around the house one day, catching garter snakes, and he warns, in a voice somewhat hoarse from disuse, about the poisonous snakes that come up on the porch for the sun, and after a long pause he asks my name.

"Heywood, sir." I reply quickly. "Heywood Kirk."

Something flickers in his eyes and I step onto the porch as he starts to come down. He's tall but not an imposing man and yet my eleven year old body has all the hope of an ant attempting to block the path of a human. I stare down through a crack in the wood at a snake below us, curled and seemingly non-threatening, although I know it's dangerous.

"Does it hurt to die?" I blurt out. I expect the answer, the way adults talk to children, a soothing denial, a condescending smile. But he doesn't give me either. He only keeps his eyes on the snake, and a hand pressed into the wall beside him, fingers gripping the splintering wood.

"I think there are things that hurt worse than dying." The words are faint and I feel my chest twist at the familiarity of his tone.

"Me, too." I say.

I work for him after school, then, somedays, bringing food and supplies to him, running errands when he needs them. He doesn't pay me much because he has almost nothing, not even a change of clothes, and the little money he has is old coins from the 1800s or before, and a tiny nugget of gold.

I read the books in his house, left there by the people before, the myths and legends from Greece and Rome, King Arthur and Robin Hood, and a book of pirates. He doesn't bother me when I read, and says little, moving like a ghost through the rooms. Everyday he reminds me of the snakes around the porch, and I walk past them carefully, keeping a wide distance. After a while he starts to talk a little to me, asking me the date, telling me what will happen tomorrow, like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. I never pay much attention to it, because Mama always said that a person could say it would rain and be right 50% of the time. But he's never wrong so I suppose he's good at guessing.

It's like Apollo's temple, this house, filled with layers of the past, shades of the supernatural, with the snakes licking Mr. Cassandra's ears clean so he can hear the whispers of the future, and leaving him alone with the burden of it. I wonder if no one believes him, if Apollo spit into his mouth, too, and left him with a twisted gift that's more curse than blessing. After a while I notice the way he is, the strange way he starts to put out two plates and stops halfway to the table, the way he walks as if he's unbalanced on one side, the look in his eyes as he glances up and then down again when he hears my footsteps. That's when I figure out he wasn't always alone like this. Somebody else was with him and is gone now. I know because I've walked that way, too, looked around and found nothing. I'm not grown up like him but I understand loss.

"What happened to the other person?" I ask one day as I'm helping him wash the windows. He stops, hand halfway to the soapy rag.

"What person?" His voice is careful.

"Somebody you were with. Was it your brother?"

He looks at me, then, and for the first time I see his eyes clearly. Black as night, deep as the ocean, and filled with so much pain it's like a knife in the heart to look at them. "A friend." He says softly. "Like a brother to me. We traveled together for a long time."

"Did you kill him?" He looks startled, then stunned.

"No. Heywood, no, of course not. Why would you think...?"

"Cain and Abel, like in Sunday School. Mama says all brothers are against brothers."

"No, Heywood." A look of pain crosses his face. "He was...is the closest thing to a brother I ever had. And I would have sold my soul before I'd hurt him. Not all brothers hate their brothers. Only a few."

"Did he die, then?" The soap streaks across the window, a thin cord wrapped around the glass.

"I don't know." His rags wipes away the line, leaving a faint smear. "We were traveling. I lost him. He stayed somewhere and I went on. Eventually I came here."

"Did you try to find him back?"

"I always look, Heywood." His voice stabs him, every word bleeding. "I won't find him."

"Mr. Cassandra?" I venture a look at him and he's watching me, a hand still resting on the window sill. "Did he believe you about every tomorrow? Did he blame you for losing him?"

His head lifts, slightly, the stoop of his shoulders straightening and taking away some of the aged look of his body. "Always." He says faintly, and there's a slight smile beneath the edges of the word. "And no, he would never have blamed me."

"I wouldn't, either." I say, and there's a fierceness to the words. He looks surprised, but only nods.

"Thank you, Heywood."

oooOOOooo

Once, I see the farmer killing his trees, tiny saplings and shade trees barely grown, like newborns. He's a strange man, not in the way Mr. Cassandra is, but dark, like a hurricane over the water. I run past his farm and to the old house, and Mr. Cassandra is there as always, a snack of bread and jelly and a glass of milk waiting for me.

"What was your friend like?" I slide into the chair as he sits across from me, taking a slice for himself. He spreads the jelly across the bread and I see his eyes flicker with the memories.

"Like an anchor." He says finally. "He had more strength than anyone I've ever known."

"Did he look like you?"

"Dark, like me. A little older." He tips a finger toward his forehead, an absent gesture. "He had a widow's peak there. No, he didn't look like me."

"If he'd looked like you would you ever be able to look at yourself again?" I stare down at my face in the dim reflection of the table.

"Yes." He's studying me, some note of empathy echoing between us. "All of us carry pieces of other people inside us, Heywood. Our parents' eyes, our siblings' habits, our friends' dreams. Some of those people we lose. We live for all of them. They go on because we go on."

"Is it enough?" I ask faintly, and my voice quivers, as if something wound tight inside me is tugging loose. "It shouldn't have to be, should it, Mr. Cassandra? They should be here, too." I look up and his eyes are glinting with unshed tears. He doesn't reply.

That night I tell Father about the farmer, Mr. Kehoe. He tells me not to go by there again, to take the long way to school. I don't obey.

oooOOOooo

I tell him, finally, during the afternoon as I'm reading a book and he's fixing a floorboard that's loose by the door.

"I killed my brother when I was born." The words hang heavily in the air, a murder confession before a judge and jury. His head lifts as he stands, turning to face me. "We were twins. My cord wrapped around his neck. It was my fault he died."

He comes and sits across from me, and he looks old and worn. "Heywood." His voice is soft, gentle. "It wasn't your fault. It just happened."

"But why did I live instead of him?" The words tumble out, raw and torn. "Why didn't I die?"

"I don't know." His voice is thick. "No one ever does. I don't know why my friend was left behind and I wasn't. But my friend believed there was a reason for everything. I think I once believed it, too. Somewhere there must be a reason."

I don't know how long I stay. I tell him everything, about the pain in Mama's eyes when she looks at me, the little grave with no name, the empty spot I feel beside me where my brother should be. He listens, not speaking, not moving, until I'm hoarse. Finally I'm ready to go, and as I reach for the door his words stops me.

"Heywood, don't go to school tomorrow." His voice is low, like thunder on the horizon, a harbinger of a terrible storm. I look back, and he's staring out the window as if memorizing every building. "I told the other children's parents." He continues, almost more to himself than to me. "They wouldn't listen. None of them. Don't go to school. Go anywhere else but don't go to school."

"Why?" The word echoes, throwing itself back at me.

"Something bad will happen tomorrow." The sentence is heavy with sorrow. "Believe me, Heywood, and don't go."

I don't speak and I know he isn't expecting a reply. My shoes squeak on the floorboards as I take the porch steps two at a time, only stopping to look back once I'm outside. I still see his face in the window, a solitary and lonely figure looking across the town, eyes dark with the pain of some unseen tragedy, like Cassandra, the first one to see, watching her brother's body being dragged back into the city.

oooOOOooo

"Mr. Cassandra told me not to go to school tomorrow." My voice is barely above a whisper but the words echo, retreating into the corners like the spiders on the webs over the toys that would have been _his_. "He said bad things would happen."

Mama still doesn't turn, eyes staring into the sink, scrubbing the dishes. "He's a strange man. I don't want you talking to him again."

"Should I stay home, Mama?"

She doesn't answer this time and I want to catch her arm, shake her, and demand she look at me, that she see me and not my brother, blue and lifeless, in the reflection of my eyes. But I don't.

I don't go to school. I walk, away from the farmer, away from school, and away from the house. I walk until I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, and the breath in my lungs escaping in ragged gasps. Finally I sit beneath a tree and stare up at the sun through the branches, and think, just think, of my brother, of Mr. Cassandra's eyes, and of the warning. And then, somewhere in the middle of my thoughts, I hear the explosions.

oooOOOooo

It takes me a while to understand what happened, to grasp the horror of the scene as I see the school, collapsed and blackened, smoking from flickering fires that dot the walls like tiny beacons. There's a wall down, with little arms and legs sticking out from beneath, and I numbly hear voices shouting as men heave the wall, pulling bodies from beneath, searching for anyone alive. The postmaster is lying on the ground with a man beside him and I choke, dry heaving as I see his leg is gone, just a bloody and torn bit left. Mr. Buck comes out of the wreckage, dragging something I dimly recognize as dynamite, and more men run to join him. Mrs. Hart is huddled on the steps, Percy cradling in her arms, with his two sisters lying on either side of her, faces white and frozen in death. I'm in shock, too numb to move.

My father is there, carrying one of the teachers out, and he shouts at me to get back. Mama isn't there, of course, but I didn't expect her. I dimly recognize Mr. Kehoe's truck, burned and twisted, and someone or something in the wreckage. I turn, and run, away from the horror, from what's left of school, and toward Mr. Cassandra's.

I run up the steps of the boarding house, a splinter of wood catching my hand as I grab for the door and stop, seeing him sitting on the porch.

"You _knew_." The words rip out of me, like a scab torn too early from a wound, every letter bleeding. My feet are planted in front of him, the countless cracks in the worn porch forming a vine-like pattern around me, and his eyes follow them for a long time before looking up. "You're like Cassandra. You know what's going to happen."

"Heywood, I can't see the future." He says softly, and he looks so much older in that moment, a man still in his thirties but aged and worn. "I'm from the future. Your future." My head shakes and he doesn't stop, only continuing. "Six hours of your life. Enough time to miss the explosions. You wouldn't even have missed it if nothing had happened that day. But it did and you survived. And you've always wondered why you didn't go to school but you don't remember." He gives a strange smile. "I didn't remember myself. It's like ripples in a pond. Time irons itself out again and it's gone. When I go on you won't have any memory of ever being here. Of meeting me."

"No." My voice is harsh, a rough jerking sound. "I won't forget you. I won't. You're the only person who's ever understood me. You don't blame me for my brother. You don't look at me and wonder if he would be exactly like me. You just see _me_."

He reaches out his hand and puts it on my shoulder, warm and calloused with a fine web of old scars and scrapes worked into the skin like an ancient map, and I grab onto his arms, my face falling against the scratchy wool of his sweater, clinging to him as a hot tear stains my sleeve.

"Clytemnestra kills Cassandra." My voice is muffled but there's a desperation in it, as if the answer to my question means everything in the world. "She knows he's going to kill her and she doesn't run. She walks into the room. Why does she do that?"

There's a long pause, so long I think he hasn't heard. When he speaks his voice is ragged around the edges. "I suppose she grew tired." And I want a different answer, because even if he's right, it still hurts.

"You're going to find your friend someday." I state firmly, because I've never believed anything so much in my life. "I know you will." He pulls back, his hand reaching out and gently ruffling my hair, and I think if I could have chosen my father I would have picked him. He steps away, then, toward the inside.

"Mr. Cassandra." He stops against the door, hand on the wood, and I stare hard into the back of his sweater, eyes frozen on it as if I can remember forever, because I know it's the last time I'll ever see him. "What's your name?"

He doesn't look back, and for a long time I think he hasn't heard me.

"Tony."

I lift my chin. "I'm proud to have met you, Mr. Tony."

oooOOOooo

In autumn when the trees turn crimson and gold, I walk past the Kehoe farm and look at the blackened earth, the twisted stumps of trees, and the tiny bits of broken metal. In the center of the stand of saplings there's a little girdled tree, choked to death, leaning against another that somehow worked free. It's a frail thing, clinging to life, but alive, pushing against the destruction around it with all it's might. I kneel and clear around it, giving it room to breathe, and I rest my hand against the dead one, it's near twin.

I think I understand then. The sapling didn't choose to survive at the expense of the other. It simply did. Like me, and my brother. No one could have changed it. I didn't do it. I carry him with me in my face and in my movements, a mirror of what could have been, but not what is. He's with me, but not me, and I think I'm strong enough to live like that, to live for both of us and not linger in his shadow. We've all started healing, I suppose, scars closing over wounds and leaving us forever changed but surviving, learning to live with the ghosts and not become one ourselves.

I walk home past the old abandoned house, run-down and overgrown with weeds. Only the snakes go inside and everyone says it's haunted.

I wouldn't know about that.


	9. Outside of Camelot

_"What we remember from childhood we remember forever: permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen."-Cynthia Ozick_

She's six before someone tells her there's no Santa Claus, but it doesn't matter because she's never believed in him anyway. No Santa, no tooth fairy, no Easter Bunny, and nothing else that most children believe in with their whole hearts. There's never the dramatic revelation that crushes her spirit, the sudden loss of innocence and lack of trust, because Ann has never believed in anything at all.

Her parents are practical people on the downside of middle class, a pharmacist and lapsed Catholic for a father, and a housewife who carefully counts their pennies and has no patience for fairy tales or the sound of church bells that steal a couple hours of a Sunday morning. They marry for necessity instead of love, and seven and a half months later take a baby home from the hospital and name it Ann, a solid, practical name that wears comfortably like a warm coat in winter.

That her mother cares about her she has no doubt, but it isn't enough and before she's nine there's a blue-eyed man from the other side of town, a quickly written note and a wrapped present, and her mother is gone, every trace of her vanishing like the scent of her perfume on the wind, quickly forgotten and left behind. Ann doesn't cry, because she's a big girl and much too old, but she does crawl behind the counter in the pharmacy and stare at the drawing of the hand holding the sword out of the water in the book clasped between her hands until her eyes are blurred.

Later, her father finds her book, the one with the green cover and gold lettering spelling _King Arthur_ across the front, the last gift and only unpractical thing her mother ever gave her, and he takes it without a word and rips it, page by page, severing the Lady of the Lake from the sword, Gawain from his shield, Lancelot from Guinevere, and Arthur from Mordred's blade. She watches, very still, each breath shallow, as the pieces flutter into the trash, jagged edges bent up against the sides like bits of broken glass, and she says nothing. But she doesn't forgive.

Her father dies when she's nineteen, a sudden heart attack with no time to say a word, and she arranges the funeral like a dutiful daughter, every detail in place, nothing to the outside world that seems strange. But the day after, she goes into a second hand bookshop, sees an old copy of _King Arthur_ lying on a dusty shelf, and buys it.

She visits her father's grave only once, the day after, and she doesn't bring flowers or tears, only the book. She reads it over his grave, like a funeral dirge, every word enunciated and spoken firmly, chapter after chapter until her voice is hoarse, and wishes she could believe in an afterlife, if for nothing else than to think he heard her.

oooOOOooo

Whatever else her parents gave her, Ann has her mind and the determination to use it. She works her way through school, excels through her efforts, and becomes a scientist, not out of some great love for knowledge but rather because it's stable and secure, something tangible and able to be proven, something she can believe in and never doubt.

Within three years she's at Tic Toc, and she remembers the overwhelming flood of adrenaline in her veins as her car drops through the sand to the bunker below, the dizzy rush of blood to her head as her eyes take in the tower of stairs and lights, the crush of people and the sound of the project at work. Over thousands of years man has learned to manipulate everything to his advantage, from the wheel and fire to the art of war, and it only seems logical that in the end he would turn to time itself, to have control over everything, the power to alter the fabric of past and future and bend it like rope in his hands.

Here she's one of hundreds, thousands even, all devoted to the creation of a Tunnel, a giant thing that looms like an open mouth in the room, crafted moment by painful moment like a mother giving birth to a child. She learns the names of many of the others, becomes close to several of them, feels comfortable working shoulder to shoulder with General Kirk, Dr. Swain, and Jerry. But two of them stand out to her: Doug Phillips with the somber, focused face whose rare smile is like the sun from behind a cloud, and Tony Newman, headstrong, impetuous, with eyes that sparkle like coal turned to diamonds.

For Doug there's a flutter inside her heart that's in no way practical, something easily dismissed as chemical attraction and as complexly explained as the first time she's fallen in love, the first time she's allowed herself to love someone deeply without consideration to being hurt. For Tony it's a fondness, a sense of wanting to protect and be protected, like the sibling she's never had. There's never the feeling of a fifth wheel because they're something of a makeshift family, three people without families of their own who need each other.

For the first time in her life, Ann is happy, and she thinks she'll never want anything again, that she has all she needs right here. It's only for a little while, of course, but she didn't expect more, because she was never raised to believe in happily ever after, never foolish enough to think that Arthur could survive the story or that Camelot would endure forever.

She believes in nothing so it shouldn't hurt to watch everything come to an end, and she tells herself that it doesn't. She's become good at lying, it seems.

oooOOOooo

She thinks in retrospect that watching Doug disappear into the Tunnel after Tony is very much like having her heart carved out of her chest, the final beats fading away as she breathes her last. The room is hollow and overwhelmingly large without both of them, and she's strangely numb as she first sees them up on the screen, two-dimensional figures on the deck of the Titanic, like phantoms from a distant dream. Her fingers tremble over the buttons and she thinks she'll never stop shaking, never erase the sick feeling in the core of her being.

It's a chase after that, transfer after transfer until she thinks she'll go mad, her skin chafing against the controls, Tony and Doug running from death as it stands smiling at them. Tony's heart stops at Gettysburg and her's slams painfully against her ribs until the narrow thread across the screen flickers back to life. Doug fades into shock on the deck of a ship and she's cold all over, deep into the marrow of her bones until the light comes back into Tony's eyes and Doug stirs. A sword stabs Doug and pierces her through, a thousand volts digs deep into Tony to separate him from a ghost, and through it all Ann only wants to turn her back and run away until the memory of the Tunnel shakes off her like sand from the seashore, or curl up in a ball and scream until it ends, until it's over and she sees the sun again from above the ground instead of the lights of the room far below, leaves this place like a person buried alive set free from a coffin.

She never does, of course, because there's always another day, another transfer, another faint hope snuffed out like a candle flame between two fingertips, as they cling to life and she clings to sanity. She watches them, at night, at day, when others are there or when she's alone, and her hand reaches toward the screen, like a widow touching the photograph of a husband long dead, watching as they huddle against the cold or bake in the desert sun, spill blood and break bones, and she thinks that anything would be better than this, even death, and then hates herself for even thinking it.

oooOOOooo

Once, she considers forcing the Tunnel to send Doug back, to devote all their power to him and simply let Tony go, like snapping a tether and watching as an astronaut drifts away into space, and then she rips it from her mind in a bleeding slice because she could never do it, could never look at Doug again and admit it was her choice, because he would grow to hate her, slowly day by day, because he would sit in the place she sits now and watch that single line across the screen, waiting for a moment to walk through the Tunnel again. He would never leave Tony alone in there, and she couldn't either, because she loves them both in different ways, her Lancelot and Gawain in shining armour, one with her heart and the other as a sister loves her brother.

So when it's dark outside, or maybe day, because she hasn't seen either in a long time, and it's her turn to watch the signals, she sits beneath the lights, as bright as a million stars stretching across time, and she thinks of that drawing of the hand reaching out of the lake, pale fingers curled around the sword of a fallen king, water and blood mingling together and spilling out onto the shore.

Life is only a fairytale in the end, and if she'd read them as a child she would have known that where there is magic, there are always monsters. She knows the rest, though, because it's a sad story, as all fairy tales once were, because the Little Mermaid drives a knife into her heart and turns to foam upon the water, the match girl freezes in the cold, and Rapunzel's prince falls from the tower and wanders blind in the forest. At the end of every Arthurian Legend, Arthur always falls with Mordred's blade through his heart, the round table passes into history, Merlin's magic changes like dry leaves into the snows of winter, and Guinevere sends Lancelot away to wander a minstrel until the day they lay her in the ground outside the stones of cloistered halls.

"When Arthur was king," Ann says, and her voice sounds strange in the empty room, frail like the nine year old child she used to be. "Camelot was beautiful and perfect and right, a golden age of swords of magic. The knights were noble and clad in shining armour, Guinevere loved Lancelot, and Merlin was the greatest sorcerer on the face of the earth. But no one ever wonders about the people outside the walls, the subjects of the king. Do you suppose they were loved? Do you suppose they believed in the magic or anything at all? Do you suppose they knew what happiness was?"

There's no answer in the room, save for the echoes and the quiet waving of the parallel lines across the screen, silently marking the heartbeats of two men a thousand years or maybe a day away, unreachable, and above all else, lost. There's no answer, but it's all right. She wasn't expecting one, anyway.


	10. Oubliette part 1

_"The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory."-Tim O'Brien_

His hand stretches past the crystal ball, brushing the cool surface as the mist inside curls against his fingertips. The fortune teller's hand passes over his palm, blood red fingernails darting over the surface.

"Will I be rich?" His voice is high-pitched with youth, a whispered awe like a man within hallowed halls, flooded with the belief and trust of a child. The woman's dark eyes shift upwards.

"No."

His eyes crawl tentatively up the sides of the tent, lingering on the single lidless eye painted there.

"What is my fortune, then?" The words are hushed, as if the future itself is balanced on a razor's edge, a leg draped on each side, and poised to jump. The woman leans forward, bangles clanking against each other in a metallic swish of gold and silver against silk, fingernails carving invisible lines into the crystal ball beneath her hand. She reaches her other hand's first finger and tips it beneath his chin, lifting it until black eyes meet black, peering into the depths of his heart and reading the lines etched there.

"All of time, little one." She says quietly. "All of time is your's."

oooOOOooo

There are no lions or tigers left on the face of the earth. Inexplicably there's a list of extinct animals glaring on the screen of a rickety computer that's almost too advanced for them to figure out, and somewhere far below the dodo and the thylacine there's a rough, painted sketch of a lion, crude and out of proportion and obviously drawn by a person who'd never actually seen one, like the brightly colored, open-jawed dinosaurs in books when they were children. He doesn't know why but it chills him to the bone, like opening a book and finding humanity to be extinct or morphed into something unknown.

Outside the fortune teller's tent he'd heard the sound of the lions roaring, a sound in his dreams and in his mind. His hand rubs across the drawing and settles in the mane, golden-orange, and flowing in the unseen wind like the sparks blown from a fire.

The page, like everything else, burns.

oooOOOooo

He's an altar boy at his first service, and his hands tremble as he lights the candles, fingers sticky as they brush past the crucifix, catching on the edge. His hands jerk, grabbing, but miss, and the crucifix slips past his hands, shattering on the floor.

He sees the shock and rush of fear in the priest's eyes, and he wants to drop to his knees before the altar, and beg forgiveness, even as his knees lock, and he stands paralyzed.

"You'll burn for that." Billy says later, seriously, eyes wide as saucers. "God will punish you."

oooOOOooo

Archeology never did justice to Pompeii. It was beautiful, breathtakingly so, full of voices and living people swirling against a sea of mosaics as blue as the sky, and an imposing temple to the god Apollo.

They learned long ago to not attempt to reason, to explain, and certainly not to try to change anything, because there's no use, but just this once he tries, stopping an old man in the street to draw his attentions to the tremors in the earth, blocking the path of the woman carrying the rosy-cheeked toddler on her hip to force her to listen to his warnings. None of it does any good, and they burn, all of them, like a flame licking hungerly at paper, men, women, children, temples, and gods.

The heat and gas tear through the city and he crouches against a crumbling wall and digs his fingers into the other's arm until the blood supply is cut off. For an instant he thinks it's the end, and even as he looks at the reflection of the lava in his eyes he's strangely grateful. But there's a tug and a rip of space and time and they're gone, jerked away by an invisible hand, and thrown bodily through time.

He can no longer remember what Pompeii looked like now, not even vapor and flame, but he can still smell it, that hideous scent of ash and burning flesh. He wishes he couldn't remember that, either.

oooOOOooo

The firelight moves in his eyes when he speaks, like snakes writhing in a pit, and his words are poison without meaning to be cruel, venom in his veins with no malice meant.

His fist slams into his mouth and he watches him stumble backwards, more caught off guard than from the force of the blow. The other's eyes widen almost imperceptively, like the quick flickering of a fading candle, shock and pain registering and dying, and he feels cold, ice water in his veins, as if he'd just plunged twenty feet down into the depths of the ocean, numbed by the reflection of betrayal in the other's eyes.

And he sees him. He's eleven, twelve at best, a lonely child, no longer a boy and yet a man, friendless and alone. He sees himself, wrapped up in the moment.

He doesn't speak a word but inside he's screaming.

oooOOOooo

"It's an oubliette." The woman says softly, voice a sing-song chant that echoes through the damp walls. "Place of forgetting. We put people here we want to forget."

The guard at her side kicks him to the ground, half over and half off the hole as the grating scrapes aside, opening into a gaping black mouth, followed by a single shove as he loses his balance. His arms stretch out and he falls backwards, pinned in place and yet slowly falling, like the crucifix above the altar tumbling past his hands, burning, shattering.

He opens his mouth in a silent scream and it comes out a whimper, a child's cry that's all too quickly snatched away.

oooOOOooo

Slave markets are the worst of places. It isn't merely the stench and filth that clings to everything but the misery, the cloying terror in the eyes of screaming children and sobbing women, the blank stares of tattered men against the sound of cracking whips. The other is there, in the middle of it all, bound to the post, head down, and he doesn't even speak as he throws a bag of coins at the trader and crosses the gap between in three strides.

He cups a hand beneath his chin and dribbles water into his mouth, enough to bring a faint respond as the other rouses slightly and pushes at his hands with a feeble show of strength. He catches his shoulders and he struggles, yanking the ropes so tightly the skin above and below them starts to turn a sickly blue.

"Shh, easy. It's me."

He relaxes, or something closer to a collapse, as he catches him in the instant he crumbles, able to do little more than break his fall. What little he can see of his face beneath the sunburned, parched skin is milk-white. He swallows the bile in his throat, and brushes a hand across his forehead.

"You'll be all right." He says quietly. "It'll be fine."

oooOOOooo

Germany, he thinks, used to be beautiful. This Germany is anything but, bleak and hostile and teeming with misery.

They spent a week on the streets before an elderly couple takes pity on them and gives them the loft of their barn, not comfortable by any means but dry and relatively warm. They have an orphaned granddaughter, Sophia, who lives with them, a waifish scrap of a child with big eyes, and he tells her stories of a tunnel that carries travelers through time and makes her a mouse out of a handkerchief. He doesn't think anything of it - neither of them do - even a few days later when the witchfinder comes through the village again and begins reaping the souls of any he sets his eyes upon. He claims Sophia, a week before her seventh birthday, in church, because she twists her handkerchief into a mouse in the middle of the sermon and dies with it clenched in her hand like Joab with his blood spilled on the horns of the altar, because a mouse belongs to a cat and a cat is the familial spirit of a witch.

He sees her the next week in the twilight, a solemn and pale figure, a frail form against the trees, and he shows no fear, no terror at being haunted. He deserves far more than having her ghost watching him, silently questioning why a few careless words led to her death.

He should burn, he thinks.

oooOOOooo

He hears it in his breathing first, a hitch that wasn't there, a faint rasp, barely noticable unless he'd heard someone breathe day in and day out for all those years, and quickly turning wet, like water in the lungs of a drowning victim.

"Somebody call an ambulance!" His arms slip under him, lifting him into his lap and he coughs, a watery sound that twists his insides. His hand searches through his clothing and feels his blood on his hand. He feels his body shake almost imperceptively and his eyes flutter, struggling to focus.

"Don't you die on me." His voice is hoarse, like iron scraping rock. The other's eyes roll back, milk white like the crystal ball, and he feels himself shaking him as time rips them away.

They land in a Roman meadow before the days of Nero's madness, long before the land will be tainted by ashes and lined with crosses, and he coughs his way back to life, one faint gasp at a time.

That's when they find out that he can't die, not really, because he wasn't born here, and doesn't belong, and anything that touches him only shakes off with the next transfer. He's immortal, or close enough, and suddenly it's a twisted game of counting coup with the grim reaper, like a child standing in front of a train and rolling aside in the last instant.

He can't die, but that doesn't mean that he can't burn.

oooOOOooo

There's scratch marks down the walls, three deep, bleeding lines. He can't remember making them, and thinks perhaps he didn't at all. Maybe they were there all the time, and he didn't notice. There's light somewhere far off, faded yet brilliant, and his arm lifts weakly to protect his eyes, falling short of his face and landing with a hard crack against the floor.

"Tony!" He winces slightly at the sound, trying to turn his head and failing even as the shout comes again. "Tony, answer me! Tony!" He wishes Tony would answer, if only to make the voice go away and make it quiet as before, a place of spirits and ghosts and not flesh and blood.

There's footsteps pounding somewhere far off, and then the grinding creak of a grate being removed, a sound above him as someone or something scrambles down the walls, landing less than gracefully beside him. For an instant there's silence, and he keeps his eyes closed, hoping that whoever it is will go away and leave him alone.

"Mr. Phillips?"

"He's here." The voice is hoarse, strained as it raises to call to the first. A hand presses against the side of his throat and he shivers at the heat of it, burning the cross into his skin like a brand. "He's alive! Get help, quickly!" There's a sound of someone running in the distance above, and the hand at his throat moves to rest on his forehead. He struggles, jerking away from the touch, and the arms slide around him, catching him in a strong grasp. "Shhh, Tony, easy. It's me. It's Doug. Help's coming, just hold on."

His fingers twitch, flailing, and catch something, fallen out of the other's pocket. His eyes crack open, reddened slits in swollen skin, struggling to focus on the object. It's silver, etched and cast, a tiny figure pinned against a cross, scratched and damaged. The other picks it up and lays it gently in his palm, closing thickened fingers around it.

"It's your's." The voice says, and there's a catch in the words, as if he's fighting tears. He wonders why the voice is crying, what's wrong. "I found it out in the street. It was the first clue I'd found in all this time." The hand brushes matted hair off his forehead in a strangely tender gesture. "It's all right. You're going to be fine."

His head shakes, like dry leaves on the edge of a branch, poised to break loose and fall, even as the other shifts him higher, resting his head against the other's chest, as the footsteps return and the voice starts to issue orders, shouting for water and blankets and ropes. It wasn't all right, didn't the voice know that? He was supposed to burn. To burn forever. But maybe the voice doesn't remember.


	11. Oubliette part 2

_"To the elements it came from everything will return. Our bodies to earth, our blood to water, heat to fire, breath to air."-Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna_

The hands touch his shoulders.

When he was ten, he read about the Keres in a small, leather-bound book with worn paper and faded words. Mythology, from the Greeks, about dark creatures with teeth and claws, beings who lingered on battlefields to drain the dying and wounded of their blood. They came and drank his blood in the darkness, the whispering shadows that pulled on him, and he struggles, because this touch could be one of them.

"You hold on." The voice says, and it sounds strained. "Tony, stay with me, now. Look at me. Say awake." A hand grips his jaw, gently, but he flinches at the touch and the hand instantly falls away, replaced with a series of murmured apologies.

Another pair of arms reaches for him and he shudders, trying to draw back, breath wheezing like dry leaves rattling on the edge of a branch. The voice slips his arms around him protectively, shielding him against his chest but he struggles, fighting until his strength gives out, body collapsing into the other's.

"Hurry up!" The voice all but snaps, and he closes his eyes as the arms lift him off the ground, another set of hands draping a blanket across him.

The keres are kinder this time, he thinks. He wonders what he did to earn that kindness and how soon it will be before they realize he did nothing at all.

2.

"How is he?" It's the man's voice, always the man, hovering around him like a ghost. He isn't yet convinced that the voice _isn't_ a ghost, only that he's been moved from the darkness into the light and he's burning, violently burning beneath the brightness.

"The same." It's the second voice - a _doc-tor_ they call him - and he turns his head away from the sound. This voice isn't gentle like the other, and it burns, deep into his flesh and into his eyes with a white, pencil thin light, looking and searching until he thinks it will pull his brain apart. "The time he spent down in the dungeon, alone, shut off from everything...damaged his mind. To a mind like Mr. Newman's, the suffering without a light, a single sound, a touch...must have been unbearable. In time he may improve, or... In my opinion a permanent facility equipped to handle his care would be the best option."

_"All the kings horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again."_ A child's voice says, sing-song and taunting, and he turns his head back as the figure darts away from the closed window, a boy of nine with a face he thinks used to be his.

"I didn't ask for opinions!" The voice is angry, and he winces, curling into the covers and burying his face into the coarseness of the starched sheets, stiff like the hands of a corpse.

"Shhh, it's all right. easy, Tony." The hand lightly touches his arm, voice gentling. "You listen to me, Dr. Wilson." His voice is controlled now, anger reined in like a horse tethered on all sides to the ground. "He hears. He understands. He is _not_ hopeless. Tony Newman may have given up on himself but I've not."

He wonders again why the voice even bothers.

3.

The light still hurts.

He isn't used to it after the darkness - he can't remember _when_ he was used to it, and they keep it dim in his room, the light mostly coming with the sun outside his window and departing with the sunset. Dawn brings the voice, and he thinks it isn't as bad as it used to be. The voice is oddly soothing and gentle, almost sensing when it burns into him, and drawing drapes.

"You were unconscious for four days." The voice says quietly, words flowing over him like water, and he drowns in the deafening roar of them as he focuses on the silver at the man's temples and wonders when it began to spread, reaching further back into his hairline and threatening to consume.

The voice always talks, to him, to whoever he was and whatever he was to this man _brother? friend?_ , and sometimes he listens, to meaningless words and faceless names long forgotten.

"You hear me, don't you?" The voice says suddenly, and he thinks the question is very important; it must be by the burning sorrow within the words. "Even if you don't say anything, please, do something, anything, if you can hear me?"

He thinks he should do something for the voice, for the kindness it's shown him, but his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and his fingers are paralyzed, the flames having long eaten away at his skin.

There's a sound a moment later and he realizes that the voice is crying.

4.

"It was the Spanish Inquisition so they had to transfer us." The voice says quietly, and there's a catch in it, as if the voice has grown tired of talking to himself. "They weren't sure you were strong enough to survive a transfer but there was nothing to help you back there. But here..they said you can stay until you feel strong enough. Just say when."

His eyes don't leave the sheets, pure white without a single smear or drop of blood, and dry beneath his clenched hands, but he speaks, voice raw and hoarse from disuse, words scraping like rusty wire along his throat, the first thing he's said in all this time.

"I want to stay here."

But the face beams and he wonders what he ever did to have this man care so much about him.

5.

"You're Doug, aren't you?" His syntax is improving, Dr. Wilson has noted, when he shines the light into his eyes and knocks his reflexes, with a nod of his blond head. He isn't sure where the name came from, only that it fits the man, the stranger, the friend - he isn't certain of anything anymore - and that it matters what he calls him, that the voice should have a name and an identity.

"That's right." The voice says, and it's smiling again, so widely it looks stretched into a clown's painted mouth, not cruel but only happy. "And you're Tony. Tony Newman."

It doesn't fit, he thinks. His name should have burned away long ago - or was it washed away? - his head aches and he can't remember.

"It will come." The voice says softly as if reading his mind. "Just give it time."

6.

"I remember you." He says faintly, one day, almost haltingly even though his speech is no longer in jumps and starts as it once was.

Doug turns slightly, enough to look at him in profile, shoulders held in a position he recognizes as carefully bracing himself against hope. "What do you remember?" There's a thousand unspoken words behind that question, doubts of blame for abandoning him, for not finding him sooner.

"You saved me."

Doug turns, so sharply his bone creak, and a single shoulder lifts, braced like Atlas against the world. It takes Tony a full five seconds to realize he's crying again, another to reach out and touch his shoulder, twist his fingers into the roughness of his suit and hold on like a tether to a drowning man.

For an instant there's no reaction. and then Doug turns and all but grabs him, both arms wrapping him tightly in a crushing hug.

"It's going to be all right." Tony says quietly, and it is, he knows, because somehow, someway, it always is, always has been since he ran into the Tunnel and Doug followed him.

Doug's voice is muffled but there's a touch of a smile in it, rare and hidden.

"I know." He says.


	12. Split Ends

_"O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul." -Joseph Ernest Renan_

They say your life flashes before you when you die. You taste every tear, and feel it's saltiness on your tongue, like blood dripping from somewhere deep inside you, a mute cavern walled up years ago. But you don't speak to any of the memories. You were never as good with words as he was, never as quick to speak when silence would suffice.

Run with ghosts and you become one yourself. You wither and fade and turn to dust like everything around you, crumbling and shattering into exquisitely fine pieces that no one - least of all you - can put back together. You're old, so old, broken, and discarded. You believe you're lost, and then realize that you have been since you started, all those eons go.

There's blood etched beneath your fingernails, painfully crimson half moons that have long dried. At first you wiped at them frantically, motions teetering on hysteria. Now you simply ignore it, like a dread monster locked in an iron cage that you've walked around so many times that you can no longer fear it. It isn't your blood, you remember, and that makes it far more terrible.

You fall forward and die inside again, body surrendering to the labyrinth of color and sound, the awful feeling as time sucks at the marrow of your bones, draining you dry until have nothing left to give. You tell yourself you can do this again, once more, a hundred times even. You can survive because you've forgotten how to do anything else.

All this and it still doesn't feel real. It's only a dream because there were no words when you felt the rush of air as the knife left the man's hand, not even a muffled groan as you fumbled at your clothing and found no wound. You didn't need to speak to turn and see him standing there, on his feet, but staring downwards, as if transfixed by the silver tip exiting just between his ribs, the blade forced to the handle through the other side. You didn't need words when you felt his pain like a shockwave, nothing but your terror as he breathed blood, the scarlet dripping from his mouth in a steady trickle that began to run faster.

You needed no sentences, no eloquence to clasp a rock in your fist and slam it against the side of the man's head as he bends forward to examine his victim. He thrashes beneath you as your knees press his face into the dirt, hand breaking away from your mind as you bring the rock down again and again until the side of his head has a strange, foreign dent you can't quite comprehend, and your hands are stained with blood and something you don't want to identify. You don't speak, because you don't need words to become an animal, no words to stagger back to the man who's dropped to his knees.

You must have been sick then, even if you don't remember, retching as you caught him in your arms and started begging. You must have been dreaming, or someone else, as his eyes glazed over, still fixed on you, and you sat there, cradling a corpse until he was stiff and cold in your arms.

You think you buried him, but you didn't say anything over his grave. You went on, or you must have, because you were inside the Tunnel again and then out of it, a loose thread carelessly pulled from the fabric of time.

After that was the first time you saw him, and you didn't call his name or even speak to him. You only looked because he was just a child and you'd frighten him, even if your eyes burned with tears and your mind told you that it was a hallucination, a boy who only looks like him. But it wasn't, it was him, because the Tunnel, ageless creature that it is, is cruel like that, artistically cruel and twisted in a way a mortal could never be.

You ache to speak, to call to him and beg him to never go to Tic Toc, to never meet you, and to never have anything to do with that accursed Tunnel. But the words cling to your throat with salty barbs and you cannot force them out.

It's eleven trips later and two years more when you find him again, a chubby toddler stepping off the curb into the street. You move this time, instinct perhaps winning out from habits long formed. You lift him into your arms and he's so light, like a feather, not the lifeless weight you dragged into a shallow grave. You hand him back to his teary-eyed mother the instant you can, as if your touch would seer his flesh if you waited for even a second longer.

He looks back at you, black eyes wide and trusting, and you practically choke on the taste of fire and ashes in your mouth and the feel of death in your lungs. You want to scream, to claw at the blood that's long peeled from your hand, taking bits of skin with it. But you don't. Because you already know everything that's going to happen to him, like you know your own history, from his father's death at Pearl Harbor to his own somewhere in the Arabian sands. You know because you closed those innocent eyes yourself in the face of a man much older but not much changed.

It's that day that you stop looking for him and instead look for yourself. No, not look. Stalk. Whether knowingly - can a machine, a device _think_? - or by the always cruel hand of chance, you have all the opportunities time and space can offer. You relive them all, year after year, from your parents's deaths to the day you came to work at Tic Toc, even the day you met him, every memory as time loops like a skipping rope tangled around your ankles. You live a strange form of immortality, split into two bodies, as you watch yourself. You are Tithonus, but even he never suffered as much.

Now and then you try to change things. Words, even weapons. You don't listen to yourself, or anyone else it seems, and whatever glue holds time together refuses to let you kill your other self, so after a while you simply give up.

Once, yet again in the Civil War, you hold a boy as he dies. He looks something like him, same dark eyes. But not like him, too, because his eyes were alive, glittering and dancing like sparks from flint, right up until the end, not empty and hollow like this boy. He asks you, so quietly, if it hurts to die, and you tell him no, as his blood runs out of his chest and stains your hands, so much blood you know it will have to wear off rather than wash off, as before.

You feel nothing when he dies, because you've surrendered feeling ages ago, along with everything else, it seems. He's not the first man you've watch die, and he's certainly not the last.

When the end comes for you you're alone, of course. You're flat on your back with a sea of stars swimming above you and the cool grip of the night tugging at all exposed flesh, and your head is tipped back, throat exposed and vulnerable. You don't say anything, not even then, because you don't need words to slowly bleed out, to feel the broken bones strain against your skin, every frail piece broken from your fall, and know you've stopped being a ghost and finally found your rest.

You lied to that boy so long ago. It hurts, deep and probing, stretching into the corners of every nerve and cell and eating them alive, inch by agonizing inch, and you want to call to _him_ until you remember that he's been dead so much longer than you have, and you can't clearly picture his face anymore, and even his name tastes strange in your mouth, like sand baked by the desert sun.

So you say nothing. You don't need words to die.


	13. Tantalus

_"I dare say you have heard of Tantalus?...He has been condemned to stand up to his chin in a pool of water he cannot drink, beneath a vine laden with grapes he cannot eat. This wine is made from those grapes. And, since the vine was planted there for the sole purpose of tormenting Tantalus, you may be sure the grapes have an excellent flavour and aroma-and so does the wine."-Susanna Clarke_

His first sensation is cold. His fingers curl, the hard floor pressing into his skin as he winces, eyes jerking open. Slowly he climbs to his hands and knees, and staggers to his feet.

"Tony?" The word bounces, echoing back at him in a tinny mockery of his own voice. "Tony?"

"I'm here."

Doug takes a shaky step forward and his hand finds a light switch, flipping it on as he leans against the doorframe. He blinks hard, rubbing the cut at his temple where he struck the floor, as he walks forward. His fingers brush the computer screen, running over the altered equipment, so different from what he remembers, as he goes deeper into the room until he's inches from the Tunnel. His breath catches, hand reaching until he's clasping the edge, fingers digging in as if to convince himself that it's truly real. It's turned off but solid beneath his skin.

"Is it real?" The words are strained and Doug snaps out of his shock, turning to look at Tony. In the harsh light he looks pale and worn, a hand rubbing his eyes. He hasn't been well lately, not with all their transfers, but now he seems worse, as if all the strength has been drained out of him.

"Are you hurt?"

"Still that headache." His hand moves to the back of his neck, pressing. "We missed lunch." _And breakfast and last night's dinner_ , Doug mentally adds. They've missed far too many meals, and they're both weak from their last ordeal.

Tony gives a wan smile.

"Douglas Phillips and Anthony Newman?"

Doug jerks and Tony's head lifts slightly, enough to see the figure standing behind them. The stranger comes into the light, leather jacket glinting, and their eyes drop to the gun in his hand.

"What do you want?" Doug keeps his voice steady, watching the gun aimed at him.

The man dips his head. "Nick Cochran. I used to work here, history and research. I know all about you, of course. I hacked into your file. That's how I knew your friends would be sending you here, to try to stop me." The gun moves toward Tony, then back again with a flick of his wrist. "As for what I want, well, that's quite simple. I want the scientists.." His free hand fumbles on his left, catching a switch and sending an image onto the screen. He hits the lever and it sharpens into focus, showing another room of the base and a group of men and women crowded around the controls, watching. "...out there to send me back to the Ancient Rome."

"Why?" Tony's voice is barely above a whisper, hand shielding his eyes from the light of the screen.

"For Alex Cochran." The name lingers between them as if they should know it, heavy with an unspoken anger. "My brother. Another one of Tic Toc's experiments." He gives a mirthless laugh, and Tony winces, hand against his neck. "He volunteered the minute they started asking for someone to test their improvements on the Tunnel, for the adventure of it." His face clouds, hand tightening around the gun, eyes shifting to the Tunnel. "I watched him die, right there on that screen." Nick taps the tunnel with the edge of his shoe. "But nothing dies as long as you have the Tunnel and the ability to use it. There's a bomb planted in here. I detonate it unless they send me back. Their base, equipment, and all of them blows sky high."

"He's insane." Tony whispers and the gun fires, bullet striking the wall a few inches from him. Tony curls in on himself, face blanched white from the sound, half collapsing. Doug catches him, lowering him against the wall, feeling the heat of his skin radiating through his clothes.

Nick shifts the gun to his other hand and sits down in front of another screen. "Leave him." His voice is taut, as if a single push could send him off the edge.

"He's sick!" Doug bites out.

"He has meningitis."

Doug's head snaps up.

"It's all in your file, the part you haven't lived yet."

"If that's true." He keeps his voice steady. "Then he needs to be in a hospital immediately."

Nick drops into a chair in front of the computer, one hand's fingers darting across the keyboard, typing out a random string of letters and numbers. "It becomes interesting after a while to weigh one side of the scale against the other. Say this is your life." He taps the screen. "The exact way it's written in the files. No hospital. But if I let him go..." His first finger jabs a key and the string disappears. He taps out a new set and looks over at Doug. "This happens instead. Did you know that the first time this file was written you didn't go on the Titanic to save him? Another man volunteered instead and you let him go. Only he wasn't quite as resourceful as you. He died. And Newman drowned in that little cabin you found him in because no one remembered to unlock the door in their panic to get to the lifeboats."

A muscle jumps in Doug's jaw, his only movement.

"The scientists always wondered about time. Was it etched in stone or written in water? I discovered the answer." He jabs the delete key again. "Water. Always changing, always rewritten, and most of the world never notices the difference."

"If Tony has meningitis he won't survive without treatment." Doug keeps his voice empty, every emotion stripped.

Nick studies the blank screen for a long moment before looking up. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. "It hurts to lose someone, doesn't it?"

_{oooOOOooo}_

He doesn't like him at first.

Anthony Newman. Young, fiery, and determined. One glance at the plans for the Tunnel and it becomes his project, and Doug only wants to keep his distance from the endless stream of information. He speaks like a history text book and has about as much ability to befriend someone as Typhoid Mary.

Doug saw his file. Parents both deceased, raised by relatives. Sped through school, skipping grades. A brilliant mind and a passion that far exceeds the rest of them.

He's there three weeks before Doug speaks to him, and it's Thanksgiving. Most of them have already left, a single stolen day out of the year, and he's gathering his coat when he sees him, head bent over a stack of files, pencil transferring from his teeth to his hand, pausing now and then to scribble down an equation on the nearly filled sheet beside him.

"Do you need a ride?" Doug asks awkwardly. It's Thanksgiving, after all, and no matter what he thinks of him it wouldn't be right not to ask. His eyes lift, lips parting as if he wasn't aware Doug was still in the room.

"I.." He lays the pencil down. "No, thank you. I'm staying here, working on these files."

"You aren't going home for Thanksgiving?" His voice is quiet, bordering between politeness and uneasiness.

"I don't really have any home to go to." The words are quick, almost flippant, but in the moment before his head lowers Doug sees his eyes. They're pitch black, even darker than his own, raw and exposed, making him seem far younger, like a lost child. Doug lays his coat down and comes toward him, pausing when he's a few feet from the files.

"I could stay here and help with those equations." His voice echoes, hand resting on the table.

The younger man's head raises, eyes shuttered.

Doug smiles faintly. "I don't really have any home, either."

_{oooOOOooo}_

Tony shifts in his sleep, muttering something about his father, calling to him, but Doug can't understand most of the words.

"Nick." He keeps his voice even. "I have to get help for Tony."

"They give me what I want and your friend will get all the help he needs." He taps the now darkened screen. "They're still in that room, wondering whether I'll actually set the bomb off, whether it's worth the risk. But more than that, they're wondering how to get rid of me. I'm their greatest threat, you know, because I read the files. I figured it out."

"I don't understand." Tony stirs faintly, murmuring something unintelligible, and Doug wipes his forehead.

Nick's fingers tap the keys and a second later Doug's name appears on the screen. "They've been keeping records from the beginning. Constantly updated, always changing. Because time is changing. Once a guy's name came up on here and the next it was gone like he never existed at all. They erased him out of time."

"That's impossible." Doug's fingers grip Tony's sleeve. "No one has that ability."

"They do. The Tunnel isn't just a machine, Phillips. You know that. It's part of time, a slice out of it. They experiment with it, manipulate it however they want. It's all in the files, but they never let me open mine. There's a dozen blocks and passwords in place, just to keep me out." His hand curls into a fist, nails biting into his palms hard enough to break the skin. "But they let me see your's. There's something about you; some reason they don't care if I look at it. But not the rest... It's like getting tomorrow's news today. Whether you come home, how you die. Your entire life right here." He jabs the screen. "Your own private fortune teller, and one that's never wrong." Doug doesn't move.

"You can't even imagine the power they have with something like this and the means to control it." His eyes flicker. "Think of it, Phillips. You hate someone, really hate them. But you can't just kill them. So you just go back in time and erase them. You know what you could do. Say a single word and their parents never met, change a single circumstance and they were never born. Or.." His face changes. "You love someone. That woman you always wanted to marry but never asked. The father who died at Pearl Harbor." He drops his eyes to Tony. "You pinpot the exact spot, the moment of time, and change it all. Everything you ever wanted with a jump into time. You can see tomorrow and create it before it exists. Start and end wars before they begin. Kill Hitler. Save JFK. Anything and everything in the world is your's." He smiles, a twisted grimace. "Like being...God. So I play at it too and create my own flood, or in this case, a bomb, to destroy them."

"Tony was right." Doug says quietly. "You are insane."

"They made me what I am. They killed my brother like they stuck a knife in his heart, watched him die and didn't lift a finger to save him. Do you know what that's like? You tell me, what would you do to save him?" The gun points to Tony. "Beg? I got down on my knees to them, and they wouldn't even transfer him." His gaze darkens, and for a single instant Doug thinks he'll pull the trigger. But his eyes fade, growing distant.

"In your time they're lying to you, too." Nick says, and his eyes turn unblinking to the screen. "Now they use you, care about you, even if they manipulate you under government orders, but what about someday? You'll be nothing but names in a sealed file, long forgotten. If it wasn't for your friends you wouldn't have survived this long. Newman would still be dead on that Civil War battlefield and your heart would have stopped on that ship. But someday you won't have them. Everyone who cared will be long dead, and the people in my time will have whatever they want, because time will be exactly as they wish. You see." His voice softens. "All I care about is saving my brother. Someday you'll be the same way. But only you." His eyes shift to Tony and Doug's follow. He's slumped against the wall, breathing labored. Nick beckons and Doug leans forward. Nick's breath escapes in a faint whisper, a single sentence, taunting, echoing.

"He's going to die, you know."

_{oooOOOooo}_

"It's Douglas Phillips, isn't it?" He hands him the file, meeting his eyes.

"Doug." He isn't surprised he knows his name. The man absorbs information like a sponge; a single glance at a nametag and he'd learned all of the others' names the first day.

"Tony." He smiles, a quick lift of the left side of his mouth, usually somber face giving way to a warmer expression as his hand extends and Doug's meets it.

_{oooOOOooo}_

Doug thinks it's evening now, two, maybe three hours until the time limit is up. He's kneeling, Tony propped up against him, shielding him from the light. He lays his hand across Tony's chest, counting the far too rapid heartbeats beneath the panting breaths. His skin is burning hot even through the sweater, and as Doug reaches to pull it off him his muscles spasm, spine arching off the floor. He curls himself across him, as he trembles violently.

"Nick! Nick, listen to me!" His fingers dig into Tony's stiff fingers, trying to steady him, a poor treatment but the only thing he can do in the cramped confines of the corner. Nick appears over them, the gun still tight in his hand.

"He's getting worse." His words are calm, hiding the panic. There's no response.

"Nick." His fingers clutch Tony's. "Unless you allow medical help for him he's going to die. Let them send a doctor or give him to them. I'll stay here, you have my word."

"Douglas Phillips, always the noble one. You'd give up your life for him and he's not even family." His voice is flat. Tony collapses limply against Doug, stiffened neck at an awkward angle.

"He's my friend. The only family I have." He's never said the words and they taste fleeting and hollow, as if it's much too late to admit that he cares, that Tony is the brother he never had, the only person in the world he'd die for without a thought.

"Alex was my only brother." There's a smothering weight inside the words, masked by the way he spits them, dripping pain. He kicks the chair back as he crosses the room, sliding into his place in font of the computer, silently watching and waiting.

Then there's only the sound of Tony's ragged breathing and Doug's whispered words as he tries to comfort him.

_{oooOOOooo}_

"This matters more to you than the rest of us." Doug says quietly. He can see it in his eyes everytime the equations fail. "Why?"

Tony doesn't answer for a long time, so long Doug thinks he hadn't heard. When he speaks his voice is distant.

"There was a clock in the kitchen when I was a kid." His fingers crimp the edges of the paper cup of water he's drinking, pressing it in his palm. "I used to play with it all the time, turning the hands back and forth as if I could travel in time just by wishing it. Especially after my father died." Tony's head lifts. "You know, most people would give anything to go back in time and have one more day with someone." His voice is soft. "I think that someday, when the military is finished with it, people will have that day. One day to say everything they should have, to touch that person one last time. To say goodbye."

Doug's throat tightens and Tony smiles, so faint it's only a whisper.

"Actually." He says. "We wouldn't even need the tunnel at all if people remembered to do that while they had the chance."

_{oooOOOooo}_

"The man who took over General Kirk's job was Scott." Nick's voice is low, disconnected as if he's reciting a memorized passage of a book, the first time he's spoken in almost an hour. "He was the one who first knew the power of what existed here."

Tony's breathing catches, then continues. Doug lifts him higher, propping him against his chest, hands gripped around him. Tony's hand falls limply open, knuckles striking the hard floor.

"Scott's son runs things now. Dr. Steven Scott, the man who has the power over life and death. He continued on what his father had only dreamed - to bend time to his will. He became rich and powerful, working with the government one day, against it the next. He wants something, anything, all he has to do is ransom a piece of time, a life, a war, and he gets it." There's a crackle of satic through the wires and Nick's head lifts as an image fills the screen, a thin, bearded man. "Speak of the devil."

"Cochran." His voice is stiff. "I'm willing to meet and discuss your demands."

Nick gives a stiff nod. "Just you, and no one else."

The screen returns to static and Nick gets to his feet. There's a knock a few seconds later and he lifts the gun, standing in front of the door as he unlocks it.

Dr. Scott enters slowly out of the dark hallway. Nick shifts back to allow him in and in the split second that follows Doug sees the flash of metal glinting. There's no time to say anything, to warn, or even look away. Dr. Scott hits the ground as the guard behind him fires, bullets exploding, ploughing into Nick's chest. For a moment he stands there, the gun falling as if in slow motion from his hand, striking the ground silently. His eyes are wide, arms flung outwards as he falls, sliding to the floor in a tangled heap of limbs.

And then the room comes to life, filling with running footsteps and shouting voices as a group of men rush to the bomb, others the computer, aborting all systems. Dr. Scott's voice echoes behind Doug, briskly calling for medical transport. He slips out from beneath Tony, lowering him, and inching toward the broken figure on the ground. Nick's eyes flutter open, face blood-streaked and white, as Doug kneels beside him.

"Phillips." Nick rasps, and Doug reaches to hold down on the wounds even as his hands weakly push him away. "Leave it."

"You need help." Doug's voice is quiet, etched in pity.

"Listen to me." His hands catch the front of Doug's suit, pulling him close enough to hear the ragged words. "I lied. Newman lives. But there's winter and a ghetto in Russia.." His breath rattles and he fights for air, fingers digging in. "The searchlight comes on..." He stares upwards, grip losing strength. "Don't let him run."

"I won't." Doug's throat is tight, words fragile.

Nick smiles, faintly. And then his eyes fade, looking up at nothing at all. Doug pulls himself free, walking back to the corner and gathering Tony into his arms.

oooOOOooo

The hospital is quiet after hours, with only a handful of nurses passing through the hallways, none of them entering the private room. Beneath the sheets Tony looks pale and insubstantial, but he's responding to treatment, condition stable after an uphill battle. Doug sits in the chair against the bed, watching the weak but steady rise and fall of his chest, as Dr. Scott speaks, voice low and professional.

Dr. Scott clears his throat, back to him, silhouetted against the nearest window. "Cochran was mentally ill. He left us no choice."

"But you could have saved his brother." Doug's voice is rigid. "You had enough power for a transfer, didn't you, to send him back or bring Alex here?" There's no answer. "You had enough power when he died, too. And yet you stood there and watched him die. It's true, what Nick told me, isn't it?"

"There's no such thing as truth, Phillips." He turns to face him, grinding out the words. "It doesn't exist anymore. It's a different world than the one you left. All your optimistic dreams mean nothing in the end. We've changed the world. Alex Cochran was a seventeen year old kid. If he hadn't died there he'd have been killed in a car crash two years later; we knew this, that's why we chose him instead of the others who volunteered. Testing our ability to pinpoint back that far in time mattered more than wasting valuable power on a transfer."

"And I assume the same applies to Tony and me."

Dr. Scott comes forward, close enough that Doug can feel the shadow on his face, even as a smile turns his mouth upwards, a painted mask covering it. "Your friends in the past will be picking you up as soon as Newman is well enough to be moved. The world's fair was lovely, you should enjoy it. And after that..." The mask vanishes, darkness slamming back into his eyes. "Your friends only follow orders that come from higher up, and not all the places you end up are entirely accidental." He glances over at Tony, eyes trailing the IV, then back at Doug. "I understand Russia is cold in the winter." A chill crawls up Doug's spine as Dr. Scott turns to the doorway.

"I won't let him die."

"Time can't always be rewritten, Dr. Phillips." His tone is low, a fraction from a threat, as he leaves the room.

For a long moment Doug only sits there, watching the steady rise and fall of Tony's chest, hearing the hum of machines. Then he reaches out to the hand lying on top of the sheet, covering it with his own, feeling the warmth of life, of a heartbeat.

He doesn't let go.


	14. Present Tense

_"We carry the dead in our hands as we might carry water - with a careful, reverential tread... How easily, how easily their faces spill."-John Glenday_

You feel him before you see him, the arms that reach around you and lift you onto the bed, as you _know_ , as you always have.

Your eyes flutter open and his hand reaches out, holding water. It isn't food but it's all he has because he's nearly as bad off as you, and he soothes you in Gaelic, quiet words like your mother whispered before the famine took her off, or your older brother said when he boarded the ship for America.

The water tastes cold in your mouth, like the Blood Spring all those ages ago, still vivid in your senses, and for a moment you're not a child of eight but a grown man, strong of mind and limb, standing in the shadow of Glastonbury Tor. His hand gently holds your faded fingers and it's the same touch you remember, centuries ago.

You blink and your eyes close.

(Again.)

2.

This is how the world ends: not a great burst of energy, of radiance as it gives it last, an explosion of fire and ice, but a quiet, slow burning, fading and dimming almost imperceptively with each day.

The ground is dry, scorched and long paved over, the buildings vacant and filled with broken glass that cracks beneath your feet. Above you a ceiling fan turns, spun by an invisible hand or the last drop of electricity left in the wires, sputtering as it dies.

He's lying on the bed beneath it and you sit on the floor next to him, the knapsack clutched to your chest, it's meager rations - all you could steal today - guarded. Your face is bruised, lip split open, and your shoes scuff against the ground. You pull out a cracker and offer it to him, but he only looks at you.

"What's your name?" His voice is quiet, hoarse from disuse. No one talks, not anymore, and you haven't asked his name.

"Tony."

"Tony." He repeats it and the accent is off, the inflection all wrong in this voice. You say nothing because it isn't even your name, not now, but it's the only name that was ever truly your's. "You should run, while you can." He whispers. "They say there's still water up east."

You've been running a long time it seems, one life after another, each run a practice for the next. But it doesn't matter.

He coughs, a bloody trail leaving his chin and you wipe it away, watching as the heat dries it instantly against your skin, and even if you were strangers this morning you've known him forever. His mouth trembles with a smile and he's so old this time, like the great-grandfather you've nearly forgotten, and you're young, so young, and you'll never get any older.

Your hands clench, nails chewing into your palms, the dried blood against your skin, as you feel the tightness in the air, the thud of your heartbeat against the encroaching darkness, and you know, finally, that it's the end. Your fingers catch his shirt, clinging to it, your eyes closing, and in the last moment you whisper, because you know it's still out there, still listening.

"Take me back."

So it does.

3.

You taste the salt in the wind from the day you're born, and you think this life, this body was made for the sea and the ship you sail across it. You're forty-eight before you find him, and you wondered if you'd missed him this time entirely, if he'd been born somewhere else and you hadn't known.

He's sixteen years old, all gangly limbs and awkward angles, faint British accent, and yellow hair pulled back in a queue. He's born to sail and he pours his soul into it, his hours spent working on the decks and staring out across the waters with eyes full of dreams.

There's a storm six weeks after he signs on and somewhere in the middle of it another sailor notices the lad long swept overboard and tangled in the rigging. You haul him up and over the side, laying him down on the deck, breathing and pushing against a quiet heart.

It's no use, in the end, because you can't bring him back, not with the sea he loved inside him so long, and the blood frozen in his veins, but you don't stop until they pull you away from the body.

Three months later another boy signs on, and he looks nothing like him, not even the sort of boy who would trip and fall overboard, but you lash him to the mast during the first storm and curse yourself for not doing it before, even as you see his face everywhere, the large eyes watching you as the years go by. You relive that day over and over, a jagged tear beneath your heart that bleeds a little more as each day passes.

Salt water in wounds is painful, you know.

4.

His eyes are blue this time, as clear as a summer lake, and you have to search to see the dark eyes lingering beneath the surface, like the root of a plant that's been torn out of the earth but leaves a little bit behind to grow again.

He doesn't know you, of course, he never does, and he's a knight and you're only his servant, and there's no friendship in this life because even in the same time you're worlds apart. He hasn't long to live, you know this, because you can always sense it, like a storm felt in an old injury, and no matter how you try to warn him he doesn't listen.

It happens on a summer morning and there's a bit of light filtering through the trees, enough to catch his armour and transform it into liquid silver as he falls backwards off his horse, the crossbow arrow lodged in his throat. You run to him, your cape catching around your knees, nearly tripping you, as you fall beside him and pull him into your arms, the sound of the fighting all around you little more than a dull clang inside your head.

He tries to speak, but he can't because of all the blood, and you're crying, because you've watched him die so many times already, and it shouldn't hurt, not anymore, but it always does.

"It was in Scotland the first time." You say, and your voice is ragged, nothing like the way you used to sound. "I fell and I didn't even know I had the bullet in my back. You held me as I died, and I felt your blood on me. Don't you remember?"

He's heavy in your arms but he doesn't remember, and he's gone, eyes glazed, the wound stopped bleeding long ago, and you don't lay him down until they come and take him from you.

You don't know when you broke or how to put yourself back together.

5.

For Y2K, while everyone else watches Dick Clark count the ball down and worries about the lights going out, you drive out across the desert and down to Project Tic-Toc, or rather, where it used to be, because there's only an abandoned shell, half buried in the sand like an ancient Egyptian tomb.

There's sand inside, now, all but obscuring the yellow hourglass beneath your feet, but the Tunnel still stands, slowly crumbling, frayed wires clinging to the last whispers of energy. Your hands have forgotten nothing, and it's the work of minutes to locate the files, the final records. You sit in front of the screen, the dark space where your signal and his used to run across, parallel lines woven across the darkness, a monitor of your vital signs.

Part of you is still there, in the machines, because part of the Tunnel is in your veins ever since you died at Gettysburg, so long ago. It was never supposed to happen, of course, but you can't force eons of time through an all too mortal heart and not alter it. The human body is fragile and even time itself can't make it immortal. But it can change it, give it it's knowledge, all the ages from the beginning to the end of time, memories crammed into a human mind, clinging through a thousand lifetimes, making you remember even if he doesn't.

In the end, you finally understand. You should, after all, because you helped create it, poured your sweat and blood, and ultimately your life into the Tunnel, and programmed it to respond to you. There were no hands controlling the Tunnel, so it controlled itself. It was created to send and bring, to save you both, and it failed. So it did the only thing it could do - start over again, give you a second, a third life and more, over and over again, back and forth in time, a story out of order, until it succeeds in what it was programmed to do. You can't just _die_ in the past when you never were born there at all, only loop, a new life and another one, until things come out right.

There's still a spark of life left in the wires. Just a spark.

But it's enough.

6.

The earth shifts and turns as if you're standing on fragile ground, running backwards, parallel lines bleeding into each other, magnets seeking and finding again.

He's dying when they bring him to you, and there's no hope this time, not even a whisper, because he's torn and impossibly broken and for all your physician's skill you can't save him. You've seen him before, you realize, and not known him - how could you have not, unless you're starting to forget, also - strong and tall, with his sword and shield in his hand as the sand turns crimson beneath him, and he pawns his soul for a moment in the sun.

They say _we who are about to die salute you_ , and they do die, hundreds of them, even if you manage to save one or two, because even with your knowledge of the future there's precious little to create it out of in the heart of Rome.

This life he never sees you at all. You turn to pick up medicines that will do nothing and look back to see his chest still, heart having stopped without even opening his eyes.

Alchemy turns dust into gold and it crumbles in your hands.

7.

You're eighteen and there's a war again, like wine on the lips of every red-blooded male near his age, intoxicating the young and old alike as they sign their names and don their uniforms.

You join with them, because you're born for this, you can feel it in your blood and bones, the battlefields calling out to you with every breath you take. It's Christmas before you see him and realize why you were drawn into this war, when he looks across the trenches at you, and you see that his eyes are back to dark, nearly the same as you remember.

"Parlez-vous français??" The words are tentative, and the aged sound of his voice is strange to your ears, not matching the still child-like planes of his face or the pronounced ears the winter has turned red.

"Nein." You say quietly, and the other man whispers a muttered word of French, a curse you think, into his palms, breathing on his fingers to warm them against the biting cold, not calling again.

You crawl up over the edge of the trench and into his, and you talk. It doesn't matter what you tell him because he can't understand you, not a word, and certainly not "tunnel" or "signals" or any of the other things you say. But he smiles when you share your cigarettes, and your heart warms when he pulls a worn photograph from his pocket and runs a thumb across the girl's face with a touch that tells you that if he survives this war he's going home, back to her, and he'll marry her. You even reach into your uniform with numb fingers and show him your girl, the one who's not as pretty as the others but smiles when you take her hand in your's and wants a dozen children for you both to love and spoil.

The truce is over in the morning, and you don't see him when you're back in your own trench and the war starts again as if yesterday was only a dream and killing is all you know.

It comes to this: a flash of light against the darkness, the ringing in your ears, and the screams of the dying. He looks up, over the edge of the trenches _he's nineteen and he's never going home_ , and your gun falls from your hands _chances are you're never going home, either_ as you start to yell, to force him to stay down. Your gun never fires but the soldier's next to you does, and you watch as the scarlet ribbons rise up in the air and fall to the dust with the final twitches of a dying enemy.

We all fall down.

(At least this time.)

8.

You're expecting death, finally it seems, but even so it doesn't dull the pain when the knife slips up under your ribs and you start to bleed your life away into the cold, damp pavement. You land on your hands and knees, the rest of your body disconnected and nerveless as the hands rifle through your pockets and grab your wallet.

He's gone in a moment and you're lying on your back, and you can feel nothing other than the pain from the wound, one hand curled over it, the other limp beside you, the crimson rain soaking your T-shirt to your skin, and your eyes closed.

When they open again an ambulance's lights are flashing and a face swims into focus above you, blue eyes for the third time, pulling your hand away from the wound. You try to say his name - not the one he has now or even the time before, but the one he had all those lifetimes ago as you gasp for breath and choke. An oxygen mask comes down over your face, and you fight it, because this time you have to say his name, to make him remember because you can't go on anymore, not like this.

Then your heart lurches and you feel it stop, cold inside your chest. Hands close around your heart, pushing a rhythm, and it's no use, doesn't he know that, but you're first this time, and it hurts less that way.

But he doesn't let you die, doesn't leave you _he never did_ and you smile, a ragged twitch of your lips that he doesn't see, and you let yourself fall into the warming darkness, only sleeping.

When you swim back to the surface it's two weeks later and you're alive, hooked to monitors all singing with life, and he's standing there, red hair and freckles, a chart in hand, a stethoscope around his neck.

Your mind drifts as he tells you that you're lucky, that you're going to make it, while your mind is a century away, as you search for something and never find it. There's a hollow space in your heart, you realize, and you sense _know_ that it's over, the Tunnel has finally quietly gone to sleep, and this is your last life.

Then he stops, head tilting, something in his eyes, as he looks at you, and when he speaks his voice is somehow familiar, even so changed.

"Have we met before?"


	15. Comes and Goes

_"Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild, with a faery hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."-William Butler Yeats, The Stolen Child_

It happens in the space between seconds, like a flash of heat lightning across the sky, brief and forgotten. He slips a fraction to the left, and his face has barely enough time to register the look of horror on Tony's face before he strikes the ground.

He feels, rather than sees Tony slide down the rocks. His eyes shift upwards as Glastonbury Tor stares down at him in quiet sadness, and Tony's hands, still wet from the water he drank, reach for injuries he can no longer feel. There's a movement to his right, somewhere against the hillside but he can't see it, not with his eyes fading.

He sees a breath of green somewhere far away, coming closer, mingled with whispered words before his fingers clench and fall open.

oooOOOooo

It begins as such an unimportant thing, a persistently wet hem and sleeves of his sweater that won't dry, no matter how long he lays in the sun or takes it off to spread over the rocks. The soles of his shoes remain damp, even against the waterless ground, leaving footprints as he walks.

He touches the material and his fingertips dampen, skin glistening the color of the Spring, the color of blood, and his fingers touch his lips.

The taste on his tongue is only water and nothing more.

oooOOOooo

It's only a tremor in his hands at first, the slightest spasm that makes them fall to his sides, easily hidden and dismissed, even as the shaking spreads throughout his body. It isn't until three weeks later that Doug notices, late at night, and between the stone walls from each other in the scant light from a flickering candle.

He gets up and moves to him, taking off his suit coat and putting it over him, and tears prickle the back of his eyes at the simple kindness. He didn't used to be so emotional, he thinks, and a shudder passes through him. Doug lays the palm of his hand against his forehead, and quickly grasps his closest hand.

"You're like ice." His voice is quiet with concern. He sits beside him, shoulders brushing, and Tony pulls his hand free and tucks both beneath his arms, hunching forward until his elbows are resting on his knees.

It's June and the air should be warm but it's frozen, ice against his face like December, and he remembers snow on the mountains, pure white burning into his eyes and blocking out the sun.

His head rests on his knees and Doug's hand clasps his shoulder, burning hot like a brand to his skin, erasing the snow.

oooOOOooo

It's July when he starts falling, only stumbling at first, but eventually hitting the ground, as if his legs have forgotten how to hold him up.

His hands cup to lift water to his mouth but slip open, sending the liquid splashing against the stone and running back into the stream, and he balls his fingers into a fist that won't hold, the muscles too weak.

His body feels heavy, as if he's lived too long, all his effort forced into holding his head up or standing. He leans on anything he can find when he walks, and when there's nothing Doug supports him, resting often to "rebuild his strength", as Doug says.

He's fading, he thinks, and Doug doesn't see it.

Or won't.

oooOOOooo

His reflection is strange in the water, almost unrecognizable. His eyes become lighter with every passing day, as pale as silver now, and hollow, and his hands are mapped with ley lines, skin the color of chalk, as if some forgotten errors are being brought out into the open, his body remembering and slowly changing.

"You'll get well." Doug says quietly, and he stares down at his hands - tanned, strong, unwoven with the flaws that mar Tony's.

"And if I don't?" His voice has changed, too, a whisper of what it used to be.

There's no answer, but he wasn't expecting one, anyway.

oooOOOooo

They've been within a mile of Glastonbury as long as he can recall, and somewhere in the back of his mind he thinks they should have moved on long ago, been taken out, but he can't remember by whom.

Doug finds an hourglass one day, half buried in the ground, but unbroken, and passes it into his shaking hands, both of them folded and low to the ground to not shatter it as he sets it down.

"Just like home." Doug smiles, the expression falling short of his eyes, and his head lifts.

"Home?"

"The hourglass." Doug's eyes rest on it. "Like the one on the floor."

"I don't remember." He says, and something moves in Doug's eyes.

At evening, beneath the shadows of the stones, they eat the little food Doug had worked for and he traces the symbol in the dust, fingers tapping the imagined yellow and black that bleeds together into the color of the earth. Tony doesn't recognize it, and he thinks it should frighten him, horribly, but he can't remember why, either.

"Don't worry." Doug's voice is even. "It will come back to you."

"It won't." The words hang between them, seeking footing and finding no safe ground, and he should stop there but he can't. "I'll forget you, too, won't I?"

Doug looks at him for a long moment before looking away, and Tony thinks he sees a flash of raw pain deep in his eyes, hidden before it comes to the surface. He wants to strike at that pain, rip it out of Doug's eyes and take it into his own because he's hurt enough, they both have, and a little more won't be too much to bear.

"Tell me." Tony whispers, faintly. "Does it hurt more to die or to be forgotten?"

oooOOOooo

He's used to Doug caring for him when he's ill so he doesn't object or even attempt to raise his head when he takes his pulse, frowns, and bends his ear over his chest. Doug's face lifts and there's only horror there and no grief.

"Your heart isn't beating." Doug whispers, and Tony's eyes follow his hand to where it rests on his chest, motionless and silent without the slightest intake of air. His eyes drop to Doug's chest, rising and falling with breath and life, the fabric of his suit and shirt covering the scar running across his heart, deep through. And he remembers, like a switch thrown in a dark room, a single moment vivid in his mind, as he _knows_.

"He bargained with us." He says with Tony's voice, strained and distorted because he isn't Tony, never was, never could be. "You were dying. They healed you. Your life for his place in our world. And I was created for the exchange, born then."

"Is he alive?" Doug's voice is quiet, stripped of any emotion or caring, words carefully chosen and prepared, and he doesn't ask who or what he is, only for Tony, important questions first and others later.

"Yes." His people lie, but he doesn't. He isn't them, for all they made him, because he wasn't meant to be long, born to die and nothing more. "They only wanted new company, someone to talk with."

"Show me where to find him." There's no anger in his voice, only pain because he doesn't remember Tony sacrificing himself, because he didn't know he wasn't him. He lifts his arms slightly and Doug gets him to his feet, his arms over his shoulders, supporting his entire weight as he guides him verbally.

He finds the hillside easily, fingers reaching toward the opening, and Doug lays him on the grass and digs at the crack until it widens.

And he sees him, beneath the ground, deep in the mouth of the tunnel leading to the door, sleeping, curled in the cramped confines of the narrow entrance, as if he'd sought out the exit and found it barred but stayed as close as he could. Doug's fingers stretch, clawing past the dirt, inching into the hollow of the ground, and he brushes his sweater, barely touching but enough to wake him. Tony's eyes open, blinking rapidly in the sudden and harsh sunlight after near-darkness, search, and find him.

"Doug." It's more mouthed than spoken, a rush of emotion filling his eyes - happiness, pain, relief. His hand stretches up and Doug grips it, fingers clinging to each other as their other hands push at the dirt, crumbling it. Tony shoves and Doug pulls with all his strength, and he breaks free, crawling out into the sunlight. For a full minute he only looks at Doug, both staring at each other. Then Doug smiles, pulling him into a one-armed hug as Tony grips his shoulder.

He coughs, a ragged, harsh sound, and Doug turns, Tony staring as he sees the twisted, flawed copy of his own face watching him. Doug comes and kneels beside him, gently touching his arm, and he can't feel the heat anymore, nor the cold.

"Is there anything I can do?"

"No." He voice sounds nothing like Tony's, not now. "You leave, quickly, before they realize he's escaped."

Doug looks at him for only a moment, with pity, he thinks, and he shouldn't feel pity, not for him, because he's only magic and enchantments and not flesh and blood and soul. Doug won't even remember him when he dies, because he doesn't die, only fades away, from memory, from the world, and he's been fading since the moment he was born.

"Thank you." Moisture glistens in Doug's eyes, and he smiles faintly, like Tony's smile but not quite. Doug catches Tony's arm, pulling him away, and he watches them go through blurred and faded eyes. His hand trembles, but not enough to stop him from pushing at the dirt until it's piled over the entrance into the hillside, blocking it until the worlds are sealed off from each other.

He thinks he knows the answer to his question in the end.

It hurts more to be forgotten.


	16. Homecoming

_"Sticks and stones are hard on bones aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart."-Phyllis McGinley_

I feel his back beneath me, hard shoulder bones into my damaged rib cage as he runs, carrying me, gasping for breath. His arms lower me onto the ground, and I choke as I see the fear in his eyes.

I reach out my hand and he fades into ashes.

oooOOOooo

I have a private room in the hospital, the one they rushed me to after carrying me out of the Tunnel, with doctors assigned only to my case, specialists that did a superhuman feat by putting me back together.

They take me off life support as soon as I'm strong enough, the tube leaving my throat raw, and speaking impossible.

Ann comes to see me the day after, the first day I'm allowed visitors, touching my arm above the bandages that can't come off yet, the only place where her touch will do no damage.

She doesn't cry and says little. But her eyes scream _why you? why not him?_.

They tell me he's dead.

I already knew.

oooOOOooo

They let me go, eventually, to an apartment paid for a year in an advance in a small town a block away from the cemetery. There's no grave to visit, of course, how could there be, but I go to the cemetery anyway, sitting down on the bench, face away from the sun. There's only one other person there, a woman a few years younger than I, laying flowers on a five year old grave of an infant, slightly to my left. Her head lifts as I settle on the bench, skimming me for only a moment before speaking.

"You're the time traveler, aren't you?" She asks, and her voice is odd, a faint Kentucky accent wrapped in something I can't identify. I nod faintly, and she comes closer until her shoes are against one leg of the bench. "I read about it in the papers."

"It wasn't glamorous." My words are flat, hollow, cutting her off before she can gush like the press has been doing for weeks now. "It was my fault, my stupid fault. We never should have..." My jaw clenches, and I take a harsh breath before continuing. "And yes, they did a good job. No expense was spared to patch me up." My eyes crawl up and she's watching me, expression aching with empathy.

"I wasn't asking." She sits down beside me, tucking her purse against her side. "I only wanted to say how sorry I am about your friend."

My throat contracts painfully, the air wheezing in my still-compromised lungs. They'll heal, they say, I just have to give them time. "Thank you." The words rasp, scraping the bottom of my mouth.

"How are you doing, then?" Her tone is careful, as if she's approaching a feral animal. I lift my head and look straight at her.

"I feel like they cut my arms and legs off." The words escape without my bidding. It's none of her concern. But she doesn't even blink, expression distant.

"I know." She says.

oooOOOooo

The cat turns up on my front step the day I move into the apartment, a scrawny little thing with dark fur, a white stripe down his chest, and brushes of whitish grey on his temples. I step over him carefully, and he gives me a serious, dark look, square-jawed and too bright for his own good, and for a moment it hurts too much to breathe.

I buy cat food and set it out on the step. He keeps his distance but the bowl is always empty in the morning.

oooOOOooo

"You could put up a marker for him." She offers, suggestion gentle, but I shake my head.

"It wouldn't be the same."

"Because he died in the past?"

"Because there's no body to bury."

She's quiet for a moment, and when she speaks the words are carefully chosen. "The papers didn't say how he died." Its not a question; she's offering an opening for me to speak, not forcing me.

I don't answer.

oooOOOooo

I find a job working with historical records, my first-hand knowledge simplifying the skills required, the pay enough to live on. I clean up the apartment a little, buy some furniture, and put in some of the old things Tic-Toc saved for me.

"Do you think the pastors and priests and are right?" She asks me when I see her again, down on hands and knees as she carefully removes the dead weeds from around the grave, brushing leaves off the name. "That something...stays after the person dies? A soul in heaven, or a ghost?"

"I was an altar boy." My voice cracks, unable to progress further, as if the simple statement is enough, mind filling with candles and incense, the Rosary in my hands, and the sound of prayers.

"I like to think a soul is made of glass." Her fingers dig into the dirt. "Breaking into a thousand little stars up there in the galaxy, everyone who died, and we look at them and don't recognize the person we knew."

"I would." My voice sounds foreign to my own ears. She glances back at me.

"I think I would, too."

oooOOOooo

"He was dark-haired, like me." I say, as if a single description will paint him in her mind.

"Was?"

"He's dead." My voice is stiff, as if I'm reciting an old school lesson. _2-1=1_ I'm stating what she already knows, the papers said that much, the headlines burned into my mind _one time traveler returns alive, the other dead_.

"I've always hated the past tense." She interrupts, and the sunlight plays across her hair, turning the yellow to stark white. "She _was_ my sister. He _was_ older than I. As if they aren't that anymore. People don't stop being what they are just because they die."

The cat looks healthier now, with my steady feeding, and he sits down when I bring him his food and watches me, head slightly tilted to the side in an oddly human expression.

oooOOOooo

"He hated tight collars." I tell her, breaking into the silence as the rain trickles down and neither of us notice. "But he always wore suits, ties, sweaters. I don't know why."

"Amy had long fingers." She says, and there's so much unspoken behind the words, as if it's very important for me to know that fact. "I thought she'd be a pianist."

oooOOOooo

"I saw an epitaph on an old grave once." She offers me half a sandwich and I take it, fingers twisting slightly sideways as the taut skin protests the motion. "'Here lies our darling baby boy, he never cries or hollers, he lived for one and twenty days, and cost us forty dollars.' No name, no date. I thought, what kind of epitaph is that to put a baby under, as if they didn't care at all? And all those baby graves, 'infant son', 'baby daughter', 'stillborn', little forgotten ghosts."

I drop part of the sandwich and she catches it before it hits my lap, holding it until I get a firm grasp again.

"She lived three weeks." She wipes the crumbs onto a napkin, movements meticulous as if there's nothing more important in the world. "I put her to bed one night and in the morning she was dead. Crib death, the doctor said, no one's fault." The crumbs line up, marching across the napkin.

"Do you ever get over it?" My voice trembles slightly, and she looks up at me, deep into my eyes.

"No." Her voice is soft. "But you learn to survive."

oooOOOooo

"He was the only family I had." I tell her finally. It's more personal than anything I've told her so far, something about me and not just him. "My father died at Pearl Harbor, and my mother the year before that, when I was a boy, and his parents were long dead. We had no siblings, no close living relatives, and neither of us made friends easily. Somehow we became friends."

"You must have been much alike."

I close my eyes and I see him standing there, wedged into a narrow room on the Titanic, dressed in period clothes and come to rescue me, a smile on his face, those rare smiles from such a serious person. I was the one who smiled, who laughed, and cried, and ran through emotions. He was solid, steady, like an anchor in a storm, holding me up above the water before I drowned.

"No, not much at all."

The cat comes when I call him now, and let's me touch him.

oooOOOooo

"It was the Great Chicago Fire." It's spring, I think, I've lost count of the days, and there's flowers blooming on Amy's grave, pale pink and delicate. "He saved my life. He was always doing that: the Titanic, a rack, a time I lost my memory. He wouldn't give up on me." My voice catches, breaking off.

She waits for me to speak again, and when the words follow they tumble out on top of each other, broken and jagged.

"I fell through the stairs." I say haltingly. "The floor...everything was burning..people." My hands knot into fists, bunching, the white scars carved in stark relief against the ruined skin. "He carried me out, and went back in to try to reach the others. I couldn't..my ankles were broken. I couldn't even drag myself...bleeding inside. The roof collapsed. I tried... I couldn't move. I couldn't..." I'm shaking, leaning forward, hands digging into my armpits, arms folded over my chest. "And they transferred me." I whisper. "Five minutes after that. All that and they finally sent me home, just by accident, and too late."

Her eyes are moist, and I realize that I'm crying, too, tears running silently and blurring my vision. She's close, brushing me but not touching, waiting until I've let it out, told her everything.

"I had broken ankles, ribs, and burns on my hands. I was bleeding to death from internal injuries when they carried me out of the Tunnel." I feel the blinding pain in my side, the pressure of splintered ribs stabbing internal organs as I choke on my own blood, hearing them talk about Doug _dead, no hope_. "They didn't think I'd live. I didn't want to."

"He wanted you to live." Her hand grasps mine, skin soft against the scars, gently brushing the marred spots where the fire ate at them as I tried to drag myself back into the building. "Maybe that's why you survived."

oooOOOooo

"The cat reminds me of him." The sun reflects off the flowers, pale pink shadows on the ground, little splashes of light against the earth. "Of Doug." His name tastes strange in my mouth, ashes and salt mixed together, the first time I've spoken it since the day he died. "That's crazy, isn't it?" She runs a finger along a crack in the bench, flaking paint on ancient wood.

"I don't think so." She looks up at me, and smiles, faintly and half sad. "Maybe you've learned to find him in what's left."

oooOOOooo

"How are you doing, really?" She asks, and I don't answer right away, sensing the weight behind her words.

"Better, I think." My voice is stronger, no longer hoarse from the smoke I inhaled. It's an honest answer, one fought for, an uphill climb everyday.

The cat sleeps inside, at the foot of my bed, now, and roams around the apartment during the day, seemingly content. I'll name him, someday.

oooOOOooo

I take her out for dinner, the first time we've met that's away from the graveyard, and we don't talk about Doug or Amy. They're there, silent ghosts behind us or in our arms, the weight of a hand on my shoulder that I don't feel, or the scent of talcum powder and baby food. We talk about my cat, and her job. She has no family besides a sister in Chicago, but friends at her work. We both like classical music, Italian food, and the color green. We'll go out again, Friday, to a film.

It's a start, I think, tiny steps forward. You don't get over it, I know.

But I'm learning to survive.


	17. You and Me

_**You and Me** _

_"When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful."-Barbara Bloom_

He holds his hands up to the light, palms out, watching as they tremble, the blood long dried, darkening his skin. He's had time to wash them but he hasn't. It's foolish, he knows, but it's as if by washing them, by stripping that blood off his hands, he'll be washing away Doug's life, snapping whatever thread is holding him to it. As long as the blood is on his hands from where he held down on the wound he can feel like he's holding that life, keeping it inside him.

All this time and he doesn't know Doug's blood type, can only guess and hope that his own will save him. It's a chance, a huge one, but the only one he has, because he's lost far too much blood, and there's no one else willing to attempt a transfusion, the process risky and more often than not impeded by superstition and fear. They've no equipment to determine blood type, and the concept is years away from discovery. All they know is that it works sometimes and not others. But it was a chance, a slim one, and he took it, watching as part of his blood slowly ran into Doug's veins.

Now he can only wait, lying on the bed a few feet from Doug's, watching the pale face for a sign of hope, or the moment when his world falls apart.

And then Doug stirs, murmuring something unintelligible and his heart leaps up into his throat as the doctor bends over him, checking vital signs. When he straightens, he's smiling and nodding, telling him that he's been lucky this time, that it worked.

He isn't as surprised as he thought he would be. Maybe it's because they're like brothers, like two halves of a whole, so why wouldn't they have the same blood, or at least one he could share?

He doesn't question the odds of it. He's too grateful.

_"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive."-Josephine Hart_

He didn't hold onto anything growing up. He had lots of toys as a child, far more than most children have, but they didn't fill the loneliness when his parents weren't around, and his father viewed attachments as a sign of weakness, a flaw he wouldn't permit in his only son.

As an adult, Doug was reserved with any contact, waiting for permission, hesitating before the simple act of shaking hands. Tony, tactile by nature, but years without allowing himself to even speak a thought to another person, changed that at the beginning, holding his hand out for that first handshake until Doug took it. A baby dies without touch, and everyone else shrivels up like a leaf in autumn, growing cold and lifeless inside.

Which is why he holds onto Tony a little longer than is necessary, a grasped shoulder, a support from falling, a squeezed arm to convince himself that they're still both here, still alive, still trying to get home. He's the first thing, the first person he's leaned on, held onto, in his entire life.

For all his money, his father didn't have a true friend in the world, not a single living soul who cared if he lived or died. And Doug has Tony, who would and almost has died for him, who keeps him going when he doesn't have any strength or hope left, and doesn't notice if he clings a little too much because he's never had anyone who didn't not notice.

In the end, money didn't do his father any good. A friend, he thinks, would have.

_"The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."-Virginia Woolf_

His eyes are still closed, hands motionless even after several hours, and Doug fights the urge to shake him, to shout his name and demand an answer.

He should wake up, the doctor says, as long as nothing is damaged in his mind - and Doug silently curses the primitive equipment and medical knowledge of 1901. He's hard-headed, Doug knows. Being shot twice in the head and escaping with only a couple scrapes should prove that. He's strong, and still young, and he bounces back, always. But this time it was a piece of steel pipe to the back of his skull, a worker with the others on strike outside the factory, and the wrong place and the wrong time, and Doug didn't see until Tony was crumbled on the ground, bleeding.

Doug clenches his fists against the sheets, studying the wrinkles in the once smooth fabric as it bunches around his knuckles, neat and pressed around Tony's unmoving hands, like a fallen snow over a man unstirring and slowly freezing to death.

He'll be fine, Doug knows. He always is. He just has to wake up first.

_"There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness."-Sam Peckinpah_

It started three months ago, the locals tell him. A virus of some sort, water, air, land borne, no one knows. All they do know is once infected it turns it's victims into monsters, not claws and teeth and zombie eyes, but all too human monsters, rabid, feral people who will tear their own family limb from limb, and don't respond to reason or even fear. There's no cure, except to let it run it's course. Twenty-four hours, and then the sunlight of the following day brings healing, some sort of natural cure, or the virus finally burning itself out in the victim's body with no apparent effects.

Only a few ever live to see that twenty-four hours end. The police, understaffed before and desperate now, along with those who have survived untouched or the lucky ones who've recovered, have turned vigilante, hunting and shooting down the infected before they can kill more, fear erupting into violence as it spreads out of the town and into surrounding cities.

Here Doug has found a church, long unused with cracking walls and smudged stained-glass windows, but easily barricaded from the inside, the old pews still strong enough to be piled up against the doors and windows for reinforcement as the shouting continues outside, the nighttime thick with horror.

There's a scream, and another shot rings out, the thud of someone striking the ground as the body beneath Doug twists sideways, grunting as he fights and struggles to get free, hands grasping fistfuls of air as he lunges for Doug's throat, falling short. Another person is dead out there, not because there was no hope for their recovery, but because there was no one who cared about them enough to hold them somewhere, to keep them until the virus runs it's course, and he's not letting that happen here, not as long as he has strength in his body and the blessing of a couple inches and several pounds on the person he keeps pinned to the floorboards.

"Easy." Doug whispers in a voice long hoarse from hours of pointless words, useless talking. "Only another hour. Just one hour and two minutes now."

The body beneath him whimpers, fists clenching and unclenching as another shot echoes through the darkness. Doug grits his teeth, digs his knees into Tony's back, and holds on.

_"I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders."-Jewish proverb_

It's nearly morning and it's still raining, hard and cold against the windows of the cabin he found, a long abandoned but still sturdy line shack in the mountains a dozen miles from nowhere. It's not stocked but the best he could find and he had to get Doug somewhere and dry after that fall he took into the river and the cough that's since settled into his lungs.

The fire crackles on the hearth, pitifully low on the bits of dry wood he could find, and he pushes another precious stick in, watching as if takes fire, slowly turning to ashes. There's no bed so Doug is propped up in his arms, bundled with the couple old blankets he found along with his sweater, too small but still warm.

Doug coughs and he wipes his forehead, grimacing as he feels the parchment dry skin of an unbroken fever. He shakes, turning his face toward the fire in his delirium and Tony stops him, supporting his head as Doug groans, unable to find comfort.

_"My mother was wealthy."_ He hears Doug's voice, a rare unguarded moment when they were in a castle on Mother's Day, watching a woman sing to her son. _"She never once sang lullabies._

_"Mine did."_ Tony says quietly. _"One of them, I can still hear it."_

_"Must have been nice."_ His tone is stiff, but he can hear the wistfulness hidden beneath.

Doug coughs again, a wet, thick sound as he shifts him higher, wrapping his arms over his shoulders to keep him warm. Tony blinks away the hot tears that gather at the back of his eyes, and starts to hum.

_"Hush little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird."_

_"I don't know that there are haunted houses. I know that there are dark staircases and haunted people."-Robert Brault_

He frightens him sometimes.

It isn't just the way he always seems to attract trouble like a magnet, or even the times he gets hurt. He's resilient, or impossibly lucky, because what man survives two shots to the head and a stopped heart and comes out with nothing but a couple cuts and temporary amnesia?

It's how he throws himself into danger, like a man walking beneath lightning, waiting for it to strike him. For all his skill at surviving, Tony Newman lives like he has a death wish, like he cares nothing for his own life, and only Doug's and those around him.

And that frightens Doug to death. Because for now he's here, able to drag Tony out of every scrape, to patch him up, to pull him away from his dead father, and shake the sense back into him, to carry him off a rack, and warn him when a spear comes too close. But he might not always be there. They live dangerous lives, and time is a fickle mistress, every transfer a chance that they'll come out days or even centuries apart.

So when they jump, he reaches for Tony sometimes, gripping his hand if only to ensure they arrive together, and sometimes, like the time he lost his memory, he knocks him around a little too hard, to make him fight back, to make him care about himself, to teach him to survive before it's too late.

But there's always danger, and he's always there, right in the thick of it, emerging with a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.

And Doug shivers.

_"I have woven a parachute out of everything broken."-William Stafford_

Tony doesn't make friends easily. It's not a dislike of people, or a lack of social skills, or even that he was bright growing up, far surpassing the other kids his age as he skipped grades and read ahead in all his textbooks. He had no ties when he first came to Project Tic Toc, no close family, no wife or even a girlfriend, not any friends at all, if he was being honest. He's lost enough people already.

His grandfather died when he was four, and he still remembers that was the first time he understood death, the finality and loss too large to fit inside his tiny heart as he screamed and fought his father when they lowered the coffin into the ground. His mother was next, and he didn't cry that time, because she'd been sick so long and he'd already cried all his tears, and his father needed someone strong to keep him together. He only sat very quietly, the Priest's words garbled and muffled in his ears, and stared down at the tops of his shoes, memorizing every line in the leather, the scuffed toes that no one had polished, and the knotted laces, double-tied like he always did that his mother always fixed before he went to church.

When his father died, there was no funeral, because they never found him in the rubble and confusion of Pearl Harbor, officially missing, even if everyone knew he was dead, because Anthony Newman would have gone to the ends of the earth and back before he would have abandoned his son. After that it was a shuffle of relatives, few of whom wanted to raise a seven year old, and none of whom had the patience for an endless stream of questions about life, death, and time. By the time he came to Tic Toc, Tony hadn't had a friend since Billy Neal, and no desire to find another.

It was Doug who changed that, a quiet sort of man not used to reaching out a hand of friendship, only accepting one already offered, who'd seen the loneliness and broken through, and even if Tony didn't respond instantly he'd warmed to the kindness over time. He owes him everything, he knows, not just for the friendship, but his life, countless times over, from the moment he followed him into the Tunnel and that locked room on the Titanic. He doesn't deserve a friend like that, he thinks, but then again, no one does.

Tony has lost a lot of people in his life. But he's not losing Doug, not as long as he has any say in it.


	18. Wicker Man

_"Tho' death, at some time or other, is the necessary and unavoidable portion of human nature in its present condition, yet it is not always certain, that persons taken for dead are really and irretrievably deprived of life."-Jacques-Bénigne Winslow_

**Philadelphia, October 31, 1829**

"Tell me the cause of death, Arthur."

The clock chimes uneasily behind him, each note hesitant as if dreading the next few minutes, the witching hour this Hallow's Eve, the hour in which souls are gathered, and men - like the poor twisted thing in front of him - die.

"Carriage accident." What's not torn of the man's flesh is dripping a brackish mixture of crimson and rainwater, and his stomach rolls, fighting to keep his supper down. A dollar for him to serve as the old man's assistant is worth the revulsion he felt when the men carried the body in and dumped it onto the floor, pocketfuls of grave dirt spilling out of the dead man's clothes across the clean, washed floor. Resurrection Men, they call them, and Arthur feels a chill as his eyes inch to the body's face, skin crawling as the stories his mother whispered in the darkness and the memories of All Hallow's Eves past crouching in the back of his mind.

"Good lad. Death would have been nearly instantaneous." His voice is tired but patient with the tone of a teacher, and Arthur focuses on that, trying to forget that in mere minutes he'll be watching the Doctor cut apart this body and study it.

The dead man wasn't very old, he decides, much older than Arthur but younger than his father was when the mineshaft collapsed, carrying him and ten other men a hundred feet straight down. His father had been fair when he scrubbed off the coal dust each night, yellow hair and blue eyes, fair as the moonstone his mother had worn the day she climbed the stairs to the attic and stepped off, a rope knotted around her neck. This man is dark, like some of the immigrants in the streets, hair the color of the night.

"Has the blood congealed?"

He snaps out of his thoughts and inches his fingers toward the man's hand, curled loosely and protectively against his chest. The gas lamp flickers over his head, throwing teetering figures against the wall, the Doctor's aged and bent form, his own, looming far larger than his meager height, and the bundle of bones and torn flesh sprawled in a tangle over a filthy blanket on the floor. The doctor's granddaughter's voice, sweet with the innocence of the very young, echoes from the room adjoining the hallway, and he can picture her, white fingers pressed to the smooth glass of the mirror, whispering two words over and over. He takes the man's wrist between two fingers, gingerly studying the vein. Something twitches beneath his skin and he jerks as the voice rises in the next room.

_"Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary."_

Arthur's breathing hitches, then settles into a normal rhythm, his hand reaching once more to the body on the table, this time laying his palm flat against the mangled chest, counting the seconds. There - faint and ragged but unmistakable, the upward struggle of chest muscles bringing in a whisper of air, fighting to move the stuttering heart. A droplet of blood runs across his skin and splashes onto Arthur's hand as he pulls back, staring transfixed at the pitiful man on the blanket.

"Dr. Worthington." The words come out high-pitched as his fingers stretch out, covering the worst of the wounds in a mockery of a bandage. "The body...he.. He's alive."

**Philadelphia, February, 1830**

Nobody talks about the man in the skylight room. It's the best kept secret in the boarding house, or possibly the worst, because while no one talks about him, everyone knows he's there.

Not that anyone complains, because he pays his rent on time - an envelope neatly sealed and pushed under the door the first of every month, is quiet, and is almost never seen. The orphan boy runs errands for him now and then, and as far as everyone can tell he lives most of his days behind the closed door, within four gray walls, beneath a tiny, narrow window. I've been there six weeks when he moves in, and I only catch a glimpse of him, a stooped, limping figure all but lost within the folds of a too large cloak.

"He must be ill, poor man." Mrs Greenbaum says softly, pity filling her faded eyes, as the click of her knitting needles echoes in the room.

I don't lift my eyes from the firelight, watching it dance across the hearth and back again like an endless loop, ever widening and changing.

"I think he wants to be left alone."

oooOOOooo

Looking back, we drifted apart before he died, day by day like a spiderweb of cracks and fractures within a china plate, each unnoticed until the final, fatal division that shattered it all. We saw too much in the end, the Black Plague, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, and a thousand more years of hatred and slaughter, and he felt it all driven through a silent heart.

I didn't know then that the thing that saved him would ultimately kill him, even if I should have suspected, should have guessed if nothing else, that you can't take a mortal human heart and jolt it back to life with past, present, and future, time itself, and not expect consequences. I didn't think because there were people dying all around me, burying them with my own hands everywhere we went, and he was growing weaker, paler and more strained with every passing day.

By the time I noticed it was too late, but they had a microscope, a primitive version of one at least. I spent hours hunched over it, staring at his cells through blurred, sleepless eyes., and I didn't tell him, not that day or any other, even if he'd already known all along.

I couldn't save him. No one in that time could, because all the medicine and microscopes in the world wouldn't have been enough to keep his cells together. I told myself that when I asked Tic Toc to focus all their power on him, to transfer him home and leave me behind, that I was trying to save him, giving him a chance, because they might find a cure in time.

It was a lie. The truth was it was selfish, because I couldn't watch him die, because I'd seen too much death already, and my chest clenched everytime I looked at him, recoiling as if he was contagious. His worst fear was dying alone, like his father; I'd always known from the moment I landed on the Titanic to save him, and I saw it in his eyes as he faded away with the burst of energy from the Tunnel.

He died, I know, even if Tic Toc never told me because I was lost to them now, because it was grasping at straws to think they could have pasted his cells together, piece by piece, and made him whole again, alone because I wouldn't - couldn't - watch.

Mea culpa. _My fault._

oooOOOooo

I pass the man from the skylight room on the stairs the next day, and his head is low, giving me only a glimpse of a too-thin face above a beard. He coughs when he bumps into me, and it sounds like it goes straight through his lungs, harsh and ragged. I reach out instinctively to steady him but he pulls back, continuing up without looking back.

"He don't like to be touched." I turn and the boy's standing there, hair in a gold halo around his head like an angel in a threadbare coat, one finger worrying a frayed edge of his sleeve.

"Who is he?" I ask quietly, even if I know it's none of my business. But I understand, because whatever this man has been through I've seen it and more.

"Don't know his name." The boy - Arthur, I remember - drags a sleeve across his cheek leaving a dirty trail. "He wouldn't tell us. Dr. Worthington calls him Lazarus 'cause he came back from the dead."

My chest clenches, spasming painfully. "Came back from the dead?"

Arthur leans forward, crooking a finger at me and lowering his voice to a whisper. "Got hit by a carriage, he did. And whoever hit him didn't want to get in trouble so they buried him. Thought he was dead. But the Resurrection Men came along, dug him up, and brung him to Dr. Worthington." His eyes dart around nervously. "You won't tell, will you, mister?"

"No one. I promise."

"He was still breathin', just a little. We worked on him for days. Dr. Worthington didn't think he'd live but I knew he would. His leg healed crooked and he's not got his strength back yet. But he looks a heap better than when they drug him in. I wish.." His face clouds. "He don't feel alive, he says. Like he's still in that grave. He's hurtin' and we can't fix it."

My chest twists, my eyes sharp and stinging. I turn away from the boy and hurry down the stairs, pulling my coat tightly around me.

In my dreams that night _he's_ still here, alive and watching me. I sit across from him, and reach out, my hands passing straight through his, like air through water.

"I sent you to die alone." I tell him, and it sounds like a forced apology, weak and pointless. "You should hate me."

His eyes lift, and they're the same, like spilled ink across a page.

"I don't."

oooOOOooo

I see the man again two days later, and this time he looks at me for only an instant as I pass him, black eyes somewhat clouded and glazed with fever, looking as if a good wind could knock him down. There's something in his eyes that's familiar, a nagging sense that he looks like _him_ beneath the lines of pain and I swallow it down, because it's only my mind again, playing cruel tricks.

That night as the coffee burns my fingers and the ghost of tobacco smoke from Mr. Weaver's pipe drifts through the grating in the floor, I wonder again if I could have done anything else, even if I already know the answer.

I could have stayed with him.

oooOOOooo

"I'm worried about him." Mrs. Greenbaum says over supper, and my head lifts only a fraction. "The man upstairs. He hasn't left his room for two days and Arthur said he didn't answer the door this morning." She reaches for her cane, then looks at me. "Would you be a dear, Douglas, and check on him for me?"

A refusal sticks in my throat and I give a faint nod as she thrusts the key into my hand. The stairs are dark, the lamp in my hand casting little light beyond my feet, but I find the door and open it after a knock gains no reply. I step inside and it's a narrow, sparse room, dingy gray walls and squeaking floorboards, dimly lit.

He's lying on his side in the cot. I roll him over and the arm on top flops over, landing with a thud against the floor. His chest rises and falls too rapidly, each breath wheezing in his lungs, the pulse against my fingertips racing. I tuck the ragged coat around him and slide my arms under him, one around his shoulders, the other beneath his knees, and climb to my feet, his head falling back limply. He twitches, a full body spasm that it takes me a full second to recognize as a shiver.

I carry him a flight down to my room, all too aware of the difference in temperature as the warmth hits my skin, peeling away the chill. I take him to the hearth, grabbing the quilt off my bed and bundling him in it. I chafe his hands, restraining my touch as I feel the sharpness of bone through the skin. He doesn't stir, mouth slack and gray with each harsh labored breath, and in the firelight I get my first good look at his face.

My hands freeze, body motionless, because even with the beard and the flush of fever I'd know him anywhere.

"Tony." It's not a question, or even a plea. It comes out as a gasp, and I don't even realize Arthur has entered the room until he comes up behind me, kneeling in front of us.

"You know him?" He twitches again and I come to my senses.

"Arthur, quickly, run fetch a doctor. Tell him to hurry."

He scampers away instantly, his footsteps echoing on the stairs, and I lay a hand against Tony's forehead, feeling the heat of his skin, my mind searching for answers, as if I can see through his skin to his cells, find out how and why he came back here. He twitches again, a weak shudder.

"Live." I say faintly, and the word rattles in my throat like a final gasp before dying, my chest constricted. "Just live and we'll figure this out."

oooOOOooo

"Pneumonia."

It isn't a question but Dr. Worthington nods, rubbing a hand over the balding fringe above his ears.

"Will he live?"

"Might with the proper care. The charity ward is full, and Mrs. Beecham's baby is due..." He wipes his forehead wearily.

"He'll stay here. I'll take care of him." I look back at the bed to see Arthur kneeling there, staring down into Tony's face. He turns to look up at me, the firelight dancing across his eyes.

"He's going to live, mister." He says, and his voice is very old, like an adult in a child's body. "They fixed him before he came back for you. They put all his cells back together."

I open my mouth to ask him how he even knows what a cell is when Tony coughs, choking, and I'm by the bed in an instant, lifting him upright and supporting him as he struggles for air.

When I look up again Arthur is nowhere in sight.

oooOOOooo

Tony reaches the crisis at the witching hour, tossing fitfully, hands twisting in the sheets as the fever burns in him, sapping his strength. I sit beside him, head in my hands, and I try to pray, forgotten words and voiceless pleas.

His hand flails out and I catch it, feeling the heat against my skin. I don't know how long I sit there, but sometime, minutes, hours later perhaps, he falls into sleep, true sleep and not the restless tossing and turning from before. I tuck his hand under the quilt and touch his forehead. It's damp and cool, his fever broken. Each breath comes slowly but with less struggle, and for the first time I feel a flicker of hope.

We were like brothers once, not so long ago, and I was the one who pulled away, never Tony.

"You should hate me." I whisper.

I don't notice Arthur in the corner until he looks up at me, hair glowing in the light of the fire, and smiles.

"He don't." He says softly.

oooOOOooo

None of us see Arthur again. Mrs. Greenbaum fears the worst, that the streets which had stolen so many children's lives already have claimed another, but Dr. Worthington only shakes his head and turns away.

"My first case." He tells me when he listens to Tony's lungs and finds them clear. "A little yellow-haired boy who'd been struck by a carriage. There was nothing I could do, the poor lad was all broken inside. He lived only an hour. Then a year ago Arthur turned up at my door, looking lost and all alone, and I took him in. My eyes aren't what they used to be so I needed the help, and he could work miracles, that lad. I saw him take a little stillborn baby once and breathe life back into it. That was when I realized I'd seen him before, right there on my table, held him as he died."

"You're saying Arthur is.."

"A ghost?" He rubs the hair over his ears before tugging the blanket up. "Not in the common vernacular. And I was never certain. I only supposed. There's nothing to fear from death, Mr. Phillips. No vengeful spirits and haunted houses. But every once in a while I think there's so much to give inside a body that it...lingers, as it were. You can't explain it with science or medicine. Only here." He taps his chest. "Arthur had hands for healing. He would have made a fine doctor. That gift didn't just die with him. He gave it, one final time, right when it was needed." He lays his stethoscope in his bag. "In all my years I've learned not to question a gift when it comes, only to accept it."

My eyes drop to Tony, features peaceful in sleep, eyes closed, looking like a child beneath the quilt, frail and insubstantial. But he's healing. Arthur had been right, it seemed. Whatever Tic Toc had done, they'd fixed him. In time he'd become strong again, as well as he was before his heart stopped and restarted.

"A gift." I say with a faint wonder, as if it's spring and I've come back to life after a long winter beneath the ground.

And I accept it.


	19. Bleeding Backwards

_Stockholm syndrome: noun 1. emotional attachment to a captor formed by a hostage as a result of continuous stress, dependence, and a need to cooperate for survival._

_"The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked."-Tillie Olsen_

Once there's a woman, plain and kind, who takes them in for the night. It's autumn and the leaves have turned, the ground sparse and dying, and they're worn to the breaking point, unable to go a step further.

Doug huddles beside the fire as Tony, curled fully clothed on the divan, lacking the strength to even pull off his dirty shoes, sleeps, dark circles smudged against a wan face that's grown thinner with each month. The woman - Doug never learns her name and he wouldn't remember it anyway - draws a blanket across Tony and extends the other to him, waiting until he wraps himself in it before sitting beside him. He doesn't know why but he tells her who they are and where they came from and when he's finished she doesn't doubt or question, only looks at him for a long moment before speaking.

"You must resent him." She says quietly, Welsh accent soft. "For trapping you in this." Doug's face lifts, flames wandering wearily across it.

"No." It's never occurred to him. "Never." The others, back at Tic Toc, those he resents sometimes as the months and years crawl by, resents their constant failure, the devilish way they manage to strand them in the worst of times and never the best, even for creating the Tunnel in the first place. But mostly for what they've done to both of them, how sick Tony always is, and how every now and then Doug wonders if it wouldn't be better to stand still when the army charges at them, to take a bullet or a spear and end it all. But not Tony. Never him.

"But if you'd known it would be this long...?"

"I'd do it again." He says firmly, and Tony stirs a little, coughing before falling back asleep.

"And if he ever dies?" She isn't cruel, only voicing what he's feared all along, and his chest twists painfully, like the tightening of the rack.

"He won't." His voice is low, almost threatening. "I won't let him."

Later, when they're a thousand years away from Wales, and it's so cold his breath frosts in front of his face and his hands are ice, Doug curls into a ball, his back to Tony's in an attempt to keep each other alive, and he thinks they'll be fine if they only get back.

But then he's been wrong before.

oooOOOooo

In the end, they're in the Tunnel six years, three months, and nine days. They were never truly sure of the date and it felt like longer.

They spend two months in the hospital, weak and battered, Doug to piece together a leg damaged by countless shattering falls and Tony for a body and heart weakened by a thousand volts driven through it. The leg is set and pinned into place, able to bear his weight but good for little else, and painfully stiff at any change in the weather, but he keeps it, and he's on his feet as soon as he can, hovering around Tony's room as the doctors do their best to keep him out and fail. It's habit overcoming logic, he knows, because these are the best doctors in the world, and yet he can't trust Tony to them, not after all the times he's looked after him, cared for him and cursed the fact that his title of doctor was for science and not medicine.

The body, run down more than truly ill, mends fairly quickly, food and sleep healing more than medicine ever could. As for the heart there's little the doctors can do. They tell Tony to take it easy, to rest often and not do hard work, and he might live to see his grandchildren. It's cruelty, Doug thinks, like throwing him in a cage, because Tony, so vibrant and full of energy, would wither and die without movement and activity. But somehow Tony, always the more resilient, throws himself back into life with the ease of a man who's only been away on vacation, while still managing to follow the doctor's orders. He's bright-eyed and hungry to see the world but careful not to do too much, and Doug finds himself oddly envious at his enthusiasm when all he wants to do is curl up in a corner and wait for things to go back to normal, even as he knows he's forgotten long ago what normal was.

For Doug, time stops, slowing to a nearly unbearable crawl until he thinks he'll go insane from the monotony of living one day after the next, like a foot slowly dragged in front of another. The face in the mirror, once haggard, aged far beyond his years, hollowed with hunger, lack of sleep, and hard living, fills out again but he feels less alive and more damaged than before, as if he's been stripped from the inside out and laid bare in the sun.

He had no control over time in the Tunnel, he tells himself, because they stopped trying to change things after a while because there was no use, and nothing they could change, and life came down to merely surviving, sharing the last bit of food, huddling against the darkness, struggling and fighting across a hundred distant battlefields. It was somehow overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, for life to become so powerfully simple, a constant rush of adrenaline in his veins driving him on, and he feels disconnected from it, like an addict in withdrawal.

Food no longer tastes the same, he realizes fairly quickly, after centuries of scavenging and living off whatever they were given from wild berries to carefully packaged squares of nutrition in some distant future. He eats when he's hungry, with little thought to what he's eating, and a restaurant menu is suddenly an enigma that throws his world off balance, an incomprehensible luxury. Sleeping is nearly impossible and he wanders most nights, catching naps here and there in a chair or corner. He finds himself clinging to Tony in some way, even if only a phone call, because he's his only link, the only one who shares his memories and his loss, the only one who won't mind when he tries to hold himself together and falls apart.

Ann is sympathetic, as much as she can be, even if her eyes step into shadow when he brings up a memory, a name a thousand years away, a place long destroyed and buried. She tries to make him whole again, and he loves her for it with all in him that's still capable of love, even as he feels her pain when she asks him quietly to stop talking about the Tunnel.

So he stops, letting the words fade away like old pages in a book, pressed into the back of his memory, enclosed and never forgotten. It's the best he can do, but it isn't enough.

oooOOOooo

In another, parallel world, perhaps, Doug thinks Tony, the bright inquisitive child who grew up much too quickly would have faded out like the stars, reached too high and fallen to earth with burning wings. He's that kind of person, dangerously impulsive, fatally reckless, backed against an arsenal of luck that would make the gamblers they met on that 1800s Mississippi riverboat cut off their right arms to possess. All of it combines into a mercurial blend as unstable as nitroglycerin, and twice as likely to explode.

Doug held him together all that time, carried him off a rack, and kept him safe, and he feels lost without that, like a parent with an empty nest or a military noncom who's lost all his squad. Tony needs him, of course, as a friend, a support, but not for his survival, and he isn't constantly there to ensure Doug's, anymore, because he has a life of his own now - he should, it's only right - and Doug doesn't - won't - lean on him like a crutch anymore.

He goes back to working at Tic Toc; it's all he knows, and it's easier than struggling through job interviews and the 9 to 5 schedule most of the world takes for granted, and he keeps it until they decide to destroy the Tunnel, put it to rest and work on other projects. He erupts, half hysterical, and not even Ann can calm him down. Tony's there, visiting, and he's the only voice Doug responds to, the only one he let's pry his hands off the Tunnel and lead him away, one stiff finger at a time, like stealing a precious object from a corpse.

General Kirk gives him medical leave after that, and quietly, discreetly suggests a hospital to Tony.

"No." Tony's voice is sharp, his hand tight on Doug's slumped shoulder, fingers twisted into his shirt as if pulling him, drowning, out of the river. "I won't do that to him. You don't know what he went through in there."

"But he needs help. He should be happy the Tunnel's going." Jerry shakes his head. "Not clinging to it like a lifeline."

"It's all we had!" Tony's voice rises, eyes flashing sparks like hot coals on a fire. "That Tunnel and each other. He carried me on his back when I was almost dead too many times to count, living for each transfer and the hope it would be somewhere better."

"But the hospital would.."

"He's not going." The words are practically a hiss. "Ever." Tony loops his free arm under Doug's and lifts him to his feet, tugging him with him as he walks out of the complex.

"Tony." Doug's voice sounds strange to his own ears, like a child.

"I know." He says, mouth set in a line as Doug manages to get into his side of the car, not looking back. They never see the inside of Tic Toc again.

oooOOOooo

In summer, two years since they emerged from the Tunnel, he sits on the beach beside Tony and watches Tony's wife playing with the children on the beach, children like the ones his wife and he should have, laughing and splashing in the water, unburdened and unfettered. The water swirls around them in a spiral, the sunlight glinting on the ocean, and for only an instant it reminds him of a transfer, and his chest clenches.

"I miss it." He says finally, and he doesn't say what. Tony doesn't look at him, eyes fixed on the waves and the children, a hand following an abstract pattern in the sand. But he gives the slightest nod.

"I know." He answers, and he does, because Tony has always known him better than he knows himself, as if he can see inside him and understand what draws him back, like a man pulled to fire or flood, the lure of the raw terror that once drove him. He doesn't say "so do I", though, because he doesn't miss it, never could, and Doug can't explain, even to himself, why he clings to it, why the captor that held him hostage still owns him body and soul.

He's home, and he should be content and even grateful, and he doesn't know why he isn't, or why he aches for something he hated. Tony knows, he thinks, but he doesn't ask him to explain.

oooOOOooo

He learns what it is eventually. Like a person attached to a kidnapper, he's drawn to the Tunnel and anything that reminds him of it. It was horrible and it was impossibly simple, to have life become one narrow thought, one constant terror of dying, of separation, constant adrenaline like a drug in his veins. He knows what he's become, like an old veteran who can't stop talking of a bloody war fought decades before and best forgotten, but he thinks if Tic Toc hadn't destroyed it he might have gone back to the Tunnel, run down it's corridors and disappeared inside.

It's spring when Tony dies, and he wasn't old, not really, not old enough for the grandchildren promised if there'd ever been any to begin with. The heart that supported his life through all the centuries finally gave out, because a human being is frail skin and bones, muscles, tendons, and blood, and he was never meant to be any more, never strong enough to withstand a thousand volts of time itself, a heart jump-started like a faulty wire. He died better than Doug lives, because somehow, ill as he was, he'd found a life outside of the Tunnel, one Doug never had. The funeral comes the same week as the anniversary of tearing down the Tunnel and he can't help thinking it's fitting somehow, as if a book long opened has finally been closed, leaving him alone.

Ann loved him as long as she could, bearing up through the times when she saw him pacing, staring at his hands as if he could see the blood still staining them from injuries long healed. He was impossible to talk to from the beginning, because no one can live with a ghost between them, a memory constructed of a thousand and more centuries before and beyond them, with a mind that knows what has and will be and can change nothing, like a terrible, powerless god.

He gets in the car and drives, not knowing where he's going until he finds himself at Tic Toc, long changed and moved to another place, the old complex half buried in sand and long empty, and he puts the beginning of it together that day.

It takes him nine years to rebuild the Tunnel, piecing together scraps of memory with the few notes he scribbled when they returned, and when it's finished at last it's as it should have been, able to find an exact spot in time, pinpoint it like a needle on a compass turned due north, smaller but all he needs. He sets the time and place with a grim face, steps inside without looking back, and vanishes in an instant.

In 1967, before a senator will ever visit, there's sabotage at Tic Toc, inexplicable damage done to the Tunnel itself and all other equipment, enough to force the government to abandon the project as too costly. There's nothing to prove a motive, and if anyone sees the old man who destroyed the work of nearly a decade no one suspects him of the crime.

Tony Newman never runs into a Tunnel, never wanders the length of the universe and back again, never sees all the centuries in the blink of an eye, and never feels them driven through his heart, and there's no weakening there, no irreparable injury that steals half his life. He takes a new job, leads a fairly quiet but full life, marries and raises two children alongside Doug's three, and the two families are as close as one even without the Tunnel that drew them into a maelstrom and washed them out with only each other to keep them afloat.

There's still an old man, no one, really, a strange, lost sort of person, all that might have been, all that was. He's forgotten, it seems, because even in the happiest of endings there's always something that cannot be put back together, cannot be repaired, a paradox and a single piece that no longer fits. They were wrong, the time travelers who used to exist, because for all they couldn't change, there was one thing they could, because man writes his own fate in the sand and he can easily reach out and wipe it away.

Once, a very long time ago, it seems, that old man vowed to not let another man die, to save him at all costs. And he did.


	20. Second Star To the Right

_"Isn't it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for...I don't know what exactly, but it's something that you don't mind so much not having at other times."-Kate L. Bosher_

The last Christmas Tony celebrates is in 1939. He remembers the tree towering over him with glistening lead icicles draped from each branch, and a handful of lovingly wrapped gifts beneath. The entire house smelled like the tree, pine needles and sap, and he leaned his face against a branch, only to be scratched.

"Some beautiful things hurt." His mother says gently, as she kisses the scrapes and smoothes his hair. "Next year just be more careful."

There is no next year.

In the summer his mother is already ill, and by Thanksgiving she's gone like the whisper of the wind through the trees, so quickly he could almost think it was only a terrible nightmare. His father has no heart to buy or decorate a tree when Christmas comes, but Tony goes into the boxes neatly packed away and hauls out the Creche, piece by piece, carefully arranging them on the table, Mary's face gazing tenderly down at her Son.

It isn't truly like Christmas, but he pretends, and his father's eyes mist when he sees it, crushing Tony into the front of his shirt. He feels his father's body shake as he holds him and he clings back, small hands fisted into the coarse material of his uniform, and he thinks he's lost all he can already, that nothing will happen to his father because life couldn't be that cruel.

It happens December 7, 1941, a day of Infamy and bombings, death branded into childish eyes that grow old, a war he already understands too well, and the loss of another parent, never found beneath the rubble.

There's no tree and no presents that year. There are relatives, ill-prepared to suddenly raise a child and awkward at relating to one who stares into a telescope for hours on end and asks far too many questions about time, but, like the kingdom of the White Witch in his book it's never Christmas, and always winter.

Children never grow up, not really. Not like Peter Pan, though, but more like Wendy, with Peter only dust in her toy box but still a kind of dust, unable to be erased and completely moved beyond, the love lost and never found again but still remembered.

He supposes he was too old for Christmas even then.

oooOOOooo

Truth be told, Doug doesn't know why he doesn't hate Christmas. He was like every child, he supposes, asking for unrealistic gifts from Santa, and in retrospect it isn't what he received that lingers with him but what he didn't. His parents didn't come home from their vacation in time for Christmas the year he was five, or any year after, and he learned to not be disappointed with it, as he learned to be happy with the deluge of gifts they sent from Europe to make up for them never tasting the cookies he eats until he gets sick because no one tells him not to take that many. And he never got a brother, someone to join in his games and someone to talk to because the Phillips' only son was tutored and kept away from his age-mates, none of whom his mother considered suitable to make his acquaintance, because one child was enough, and any more would have only been a burden.

He supposes there was a tree every year, his nanny would have seen to that, and one year at least he must have built a snowman or gone sledding but he can't recall any of those things. But while Christmas may not fill him with the joy of the season, he doesn't hate it, and in his own way, at least, he celebrates it.

He's a grown man, his parents are long dead, and he still remembers the year he asked for a brother and didn't get one, the year he learned what money can and cannot buy, and that life doesn't give you what you want. Not at the time, at least.

oooOOOooo

Anthony Newman arrives at Tic Toc with little baggage: a single suitcase whose contents look like they belong to someone in a movie instead of a living, breathing human being. There's a few changes of clothes - neatly folded, a razor, and a toothbrush. Nothing sentimental like Ann's houseplants that don't survive a week under the harsh lighting of the building, or Jerry's photograph of his parents.

Doug doesn't attempt to befriend him - no one does - but he works alongside him, developing a grudging respect for his talent, the nearly furious way he tackles every problem. He's not rude, simply standoffish, as if forming an acquaintanceship or saying a friendly word requires ripping himself apart and baring his soul to someone, but Doug thinks he understands that. Tony's file is concise and to the point, filled with praise for his intelligence and skills, the way he sped through school years ahead of everyone around him, and the potential for his future. His personal life consists of a single notation listing "parents: deceased, no siblings" and Doug can only guess at anything else. The man seems like someone plucked him out of time and set him down without strings and fetters, no family, no friends, no ties, and no wish to change any of that.

He stays over on Thanksgiving, working on equations and stacks of papers, and without knowing why, Doug stays, too, giving him a hand and exchanging a few words, a few glimpses into Tony's past, enough to know that beneath the carefully constructed facade there's a layer of pain waiting to erupt. So Doug stays away after that, because, even if he won't admit it to himself, he understands that better than anyone, and the last thing he wants is to confront that in someone else's eyes. Tony is fine on his own, Doug knows. After all, he's always been fine on his own, too.

oooOOOooo

In December the walls come up, locking into place, and whatever ounce of friendly exchanges and smiles lingered in Tony vanishes behind it. He's distant, ignoring any kindness, and it takes all of Ann's efforts to pry a single word out of him that isn't necessary to their work. Doug avoids him whenever possible, doing his Christmas shopping after work and concentrating on choosing Ann's gifts. Two days before Christmas he stops by a little record store to pick up a song he heard on the radio, when he sees an album to the left of it with Frank Sinatra's blue eyes staring from the cover. He hesitates for a moment, then adds it to his purchase.

On Christmas, when everyone else is leaving Doug glances back and sees Tony bent over the computer, typing calculations, shoulders slightly slumped forward. Doug tugs on his coat, then pauses.

"Merry Christmas." There's no response for a long moment, and Doug thinks he hasn't heard. When Tony looks up his eyes are hooded, careful.

"Merry Christmas." The words are forced, and Doug feels a twist in the pit of his stomach, some sense of familiarity. He takes the present, wrapped in plain red paper, out of his coat, and extends it, standing just close enough so Tony can take it from him. He looks startled, then slowly accepts it.

"It's a record." Doug says awkwardly. "I didn't know what you'd like. I thought Sinatra.." Tony's eyes lift.

"Thank you." His voice is quiet, and Doug nods, a half tilt that looks as ill at ease as he feels. He's about to leave when Tony's voice stops him, faint and strained. "It's the first Christmas gift I've gotten since...since 1939."

There's no explanation of the date, and Doug knows better than to question. With a single sentence he's somehow said everything, opened himself up and laid every hurt out. Doug takes a step back, slowly, with the caution he's always approached everyone. Doug takes the chair across from him like on Thanksgiving, resting his hand against the cool surface of the computer beside him, and Tony gets up wordlessly, pouring a cup of coffee and holding it out. Beneath the harsh lighting he looks younger, somehow, and Doug feels old, worn and world-weary. They sit in silence for a long time, Tony unwrapping and studying the record and Doug drinking coffee, slow sips as the hot liquid scalds his tongue.

"I never got a gift on Christmas." He says awkwardly, holding the information at arm's length, and Tony's eyes flicker almost imperceptibly. "My parents always mailed them home and I opened them when they arrived instead of waiting. Poor little rich kid." He gives a faint smile. "They never came home for Christmas." He doesn't know why he's even telling him this but the words spill out, tumbling. "I remember waiting.." His fingers slip and the coffee splashes against his hand, as he bites off a sharp word and slaps it away.

"It's funny." Tony's voice is raw, and if Doug couldn't see his eyes he'd think there were tears in it. "You think you grow up, but you never do." There's a sharp pain in the center of Doug's chest, a knife driven with the memories of all the Christmas Eves and Days, and he feels a sudden empathy, a link with the man across from him, as if all their differences mean nothing compared to this single understanding. He squares his shoulders.

"There's a Stack-O-Matic in Jerry's room." The words are sudden, and Tony's head lifts. "He wouldn't mind if I borrowed it." Doug gives a faint nod toward the record clenched between Tony's hand. It's a start, he thinks, a step forward, like reaching a hand into the darkness and waiting for someone to take hold. Tony smiles then, and it's genuine, the first true smile Doug's seen from him in all this time.

"Sinatra is my favorite." He says quietly.


	21. A Story Out of Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by The Time Traveler's Wife.

_"'But, I love him.' the Sea whispers to the Sun. 'I know,' The Sun replies. 'But I've loved him longer. I loved him first.'"-The Fall of Icarus - Commentary, p.d_

1.

She's three when she meets him, a disheveled middle-aged man with kind, sad eyes who finds her lost and crying in the middle of the fair and returns her to a grateful grandmother. 

She remembers, faintly, looking over her mother's shoulder, arms clasped around her neck, watching the man step backwards, blending into the crowd. She never sees him emerge on the other side.

2.

She's six when she sees him again, and it takes him a moment to recognize her because she's grown so much - nearly grown up now - and she doesn't remember him having so much grey in his hair or so many lines in his face. The eyes, still sad and gentle, haven't changed, and he hesitates only a moment before accepting the sandwich from her picnic basket, and eats it a little too fast like he's missed breakfast that day.

"Ann's a pretty name." He says softly, lowering himself onto the edge of the checked blanket with a stiffness like her grandpa when the weather is bad.

"Doug's pretty, too." She holds out a cookie and he shakes his head, a half smile forming on his lips. 

He's telling her a story about pirates and a hero named Tony and a brave little boy a bit older than her when he blinks, goes still, and vanishes. She sits motionless for a moment, mouth wide, before her hand extends, searching the place where he was, feeling the breeze between her fingers, waiting for him to reappear. But he doesn't.

Her parents don't believe her, and she stops talking about him after that, even if she doesn't forget.

3.

It's winter, five and a half years later, when he finds her again, but he's younger than she remembers and he's not alone this time. He looks thin and worn, with a cough he tries to hide, and his knuckles are white, hands wrapped around the stranger next to him, because if he looks pale the stranger looks nearly transparent with a tinge of blue.

She nearly drops her school books running across the street to him and he starts, so preoccupied he hadn't heard her footsteps crunching on the ice. He doesn't know her, and she can't figure out why, but she sees the plea in his eyes and she has him follow her home, into the house and the warmth.

Her mother's been gone a while now and her father's out in town, and won't be back until dark, so she brings down the quilt from her bed and carefully warms up the leftover soup, watching as he gives it all to the stranger, spooning it into his mouth a little at a time until he starts to blink back to life.

"We got separated in a blizzard." Doug says, so low she has to strain to hear, later when the stranger is bundled in the quilt, sleeping on the sofa. "I found shelter but Tony got caught in the worst of it. I found him just before we were transferred here but it's winter here, too, and he was too cold." He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, the movement faintly trembling.

She takes the other bowl of soup and holds it, watching as he takes it in both hands but only stares down at it.

"Why don't you remember me?" 

His head lifts and his eyes look different to her, still kind but much less sad. And he tells her a story, about travel through time, of places long ago and far in the future, and she doesn't believe it, not at first, but she hangs on every word with stars in her eyes because it's beautiful and she wants it to be true.

They're both gone, just before her father comes home, enough time for her to hide the extra bowl and quilt and pretend to have eaten from the other bowl, and that night, curled in her bed, she stares up at the ceiling and imagines _the Tunnel_ and the swirling colors and the time travelers inside. And she waits to see him again.

4.

She finds him again the spring she turns fourteen, with Tony, after the time before because he remembers her, and she splits her lunch between them and catches them up on her life, like childhood friends meeting again, because that's what she supposes Doug is, after all, and maybe Tony now, too. She doesn't make very many friends and her father is harder these days, not that he ever knew how to raise a child even before her mother left.

They stay longer this time, nearly three days, and she sneaks them food from the kitchen and lets them stay in the shed out back and her father never knows the difference, but she's happy those three days, with her secrets and her travelers, listening to their stories and watching them play out in her mind.

When she runs into the shed to find them gone she feels the bundle of food hit the ground, the sudden catch in her throat as a sob is tightly held back.

She pulls herself together and starts waiting.

5.

She's nineteen, and it's two hours after her father's funeral and he holds her as she cries, not for her father, since they were never close, but for herself, even as selfish as that seems, because she's alone now.

He's younger than he was when she was six, but older than the last time she saw him, and he's alone again. She notices it this time, what she missed when she was a child, that off-balance way he moves, as if he's missing half of himself, something you could miss if you didn't know, but never could if you did.

"Tony?"

His eyes lift, and there's the sadness she remembers, that horrible raw wound deep inside his eyes.

"We got separated. Two jumps ago. I'm alone now."

And she realizes then, why he was alone at first, why she didn't meet Tony the first two times, because he was gone, lost somewhere, never found. Her throat tightens.

"You're not alone." She hears herself saying, and she doesn't know why she kisses him, but she's known him her whole life, and he's half real friend and half imaginary and something more. He pulls back, eyes closed, but he clings to her hand like a lifeline, and she senses then that she's had it wrong all along, that he met her long before she met him, but it was all out of order and backwards.

"I'll see you again." He says, just before he fades away, and it's a promise this time, without doubt, and she believes it, and waits like she always has.

6.

Life moves on. She finishes school and goes to work, and there's little surprise when she's transferred to the new, top secret project in the underground bunker in the desert. It's Tic-Toc, the first time travel, the construction of a Tunnel, and she tastes the anticipation in the back of her throat, the realization that she was always meant to be here, that she's been waiting for this her whole life.

It should be even less of a surprise when he arrives, but her breath still catches in her throat. He's young, younger than she's ever seen him, and his eyes are gentle but bright with life and adventure, without a glimmer of sadness.

She doesn't tell him that she knows him - she wouldn't know how to explain and she doubts he'd believe her - but they become friends quickly, as if a memory has lingered for him, too, and from friendship grows something more.

She waits for Tony, too, until the day he arrives, quiet and distant and determined. He's nothing like Doug, nothing like her, but they're drawn to each other, some shared loneliness or past remembrance, and when she falls in love with Doug - not that much of a step since she was halfway there already and has been most of her life - she thinks she falls for Tony, too, not in the same way, but like the brother she never had.

She thinks about telling them everything, so many times, about the Tunnel, but the words never come, and before she realizes it, it's too late.

It's simple, and she should have seen it coming all along. Tony runs into the Tunnel, and Doug follows, because even if he can't get him back, can't get either of them back, he can save him this time, save him from the Titanic. She's used to waiting, that's the irony of it, that she's been waiting most of her life between the glimpses of him, preparing herself all this time, but she didn't put the pieces together until now.

Three years later she sees them again, both of them, only seconds before the Tunnel takes them away, long enough to tell Doug not to let go of Tony, not to get separated no matter what, because even if she can't get them back, she won't let them be alone, and if the only thing she can do is keep the sadness out of Doug's eyes, she can do that much.

7.

His story begins. 

He meets her in Tic-Toc for the first time, and again when she's eleven, in the winter with bowls of soup and a quilt, a little kindness after months of harsh cold.

He finds her when she's fourteen, over a shared lunch, and three days of rest and safety for both of them for once, like a safe harbor after a storm.

He comes to her when she's nineteen but he's not alone, this time around, because her hands were faster on the controls and she held onto both their signals and pulled them both together.

They both find her in the fair, the day she meets them, as Doug hands her over to her grandmother, and Tony smiles at her as she wipes away her tears and smiles back. And they share a picnic lunch with her in the summer she's six, carry out a mock pirate fight as she giggles.

She never can bring them back, but they're not lost in time, because she's there, always watching, keeping them together, doing her best to keep them safe, and eventually, when the Tunnel is worn down after years of transfers, and she's the last scientist still there, and they're in a quiet, sleepy little town in the late 1800s, she shuts it all down and leaves them there.

She reads about them in a dusty old history book, the strangers who found a cure for a plague that would have killed the town, a miracle they called it, that two people so long ago could imagine medicine that wouldn't be invented for half a century or more, and she smiles when she sees that Tony married and raised a family, that Doug became a teacher and inventor and lived a full life.

It's enough.


	22. Chapters

_"There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning." - Shinji Moon, What It Took To Understand_

preface

This is how your story begins: you enter the world much like any other child, small and fragile and blinking in the sudden harsh light. Unlike most, you never cry in your first moments of life, as if you were born knowing that tears can change nothing.

You're unplanned and largely unwanted, and you feel this perhaps from the very start, the indifference of parents who quickly hand off to servants and return to their lives as if their part in your existence has ended. 

You grow into sorrow like you do clothing, one size greater after the last until it's comfortable, too much a part of you to cast off. This is life, and you accept it.

one

This is how you understand family: a birthday, third, fifth, it doesn't matter, and your parents had promised _again_ to come home from their vacation early and hadn't _again_.

The servants are good to you, of course, letting you open the gifts your parents shipped, stay up as late as you want, and eat too much cake, but you don't enjoy it, any of it, and you curl up in bed, a small ball with skinny arms hugging yourself, and can't quite hide the sniffles when your nanny Florence comes in. 

"Come here, Dougie." She opens her arms and you crawl onto her lap, too old to be held, too heartbroken to care. "You're not alone, little one." She whispers soothingly, humming a lullaby around the words, and your fingers catch and twist in her sleeve, pale skin on dark, clinging until your breathing evens out and you drift off.

It's the last birthday you believe your parents might come, and the last you cry yourself to sleep, and you suppose that means you're growing up.

two

This is how you become truly alone: at ten, when your parents decide you're too old for a nanny, and she's gone the same day, with a tear-filled goodbye and a slump of her shoulders as she walks away. The glass is cold against your curled fists, but you don't beat on it or scream after her to return, because you understand, even then, that loss is final and permanent, no matter how it happens.

Five years later, and in the middle of class at the boarding school you've spent every day including holidays at, the news arrives that you're legally, since you were in every other way before, an orphan. 

You're left financially secure, able to continue your education to the fullest and want for nothing money can buy. You climb grades quickly and excel at all your classes, devoting the time other boys spend playing to hours bent over textbooks and equations. You tell yourself you're better off alone, and eventually you think you even believe it yourself.

three

This is how you find friendship, years past your childhood and without looking for it, and he's the opposite of you in so many ways, nothing alike, truly.

He arrives at Tic Toc after you, standoffish and quiet, and the other scientists think he's merely egocentric and rude, but you know better. You bond over common intellect and scientific theories, shared lunches and something you can't put a name to, some random, inexplicable thread that ties orphans and lost souls together. He's brilliant, to the point you should be envious, equally skilled at sciences and languages, history and maths, and the project means more to him than anyone.

You read his file, and you think you understand because the loss of someone you loved and never having their love at all are more alike than others might think, a bitter poison that fills your throat. It makes him desperate, reckless, and you sense that long before he enters the Tunnel, the feeling you have when you see someone doomed, not dead yet but lost, and you know the feeling all too well.

That, you see, is the beginning of how you fall.

four

This is how you make a choice: during an afternoon with a newspaper in your hand and Ann's eyes watching you, filled with all the things she won't say. She doesn't ask you not to go, because she understands that you have to, but the hope in her face is rimmed with black like a telegram bringing news of someone's death.

You might make it, you think, because you're still young and optimistic - _you'll laugh about that later, in the bitter, hollow way of the broken_ \- and you don't really say a proper goodbye, your mind so focused on saving Tony that you can't think beyond the moment. Or maybe you know, somewhere deep inside, that you're probably never going back, never seeing her again, and years from now, you won't be able to remember what she looked like or the color of her eyes, only that you loved her and if you'd had any sense at all you would have stayed.

Strange, what you forget, and all you remember.

five

This is how you learn to survive: running from one place to the next, thrown forward and backwards in time, never sure of the next moment, following Tony and trying to keep you both alive. 

They must have a name for Tony's kind, you think, a walking dead man, or something like that. The recklessness, the ever-present target on his back, the way he throws himself at each and every danger. Tony Newman is, and has been for some time, living on borrowed time. Which is why you watch him,like some sort of guardian angel without wings, because if you can't protect him, can't save him, you're not going to let him die alone.

Tony is the only constant, the only thing you can count on. Times and places change, leaving you out of balance and lost, landing like a drowning man in the sea with only the green in front of you to cling to, seeking and following that color from century to century.

You don't notice it's fading.

six

This is how you view fate: it happens, and you're powerless to change it, to alter a single detail. You give up quickly, learn to look away from the endless human suffering, even as Tony tries, struggling to save people who were never meant to live. Misery finds you, from the Crusades to the Holocaust, and you swallow your horror and choke back the bile that climbs your throat even as you drown in it.

Once, Tony huddles next to a cot in the darkest days of the Black Plague, a woman cradled against him, gently stroking hair that could have been golden if it wasn't matted and caked with filth, and you can only recoil, hands knotted into fists.

"Do you believe in God?" He asks you, so quietly you almost miss the words. He's still so devout, even after all this time, never more than two steps from the altar boy he'd been as a child. You're never sure if you envy or pity him for his faith, that strange mixture of wistful innocence and unimaginable trust.

"I don't know." You say finally, and it's the truth. God is distant and incomprehensible, invisible and unable to be found, and you've spent little time searching.

"I can't remember the Rosary." He says faintly, and for some reason, that, with everything you've seen, is the saddest.

seven

This is how you leave a mark in history: in a bloody handprint on a cave wall as you stumble, other hand going to the arrow wound in your side. You see it there, firelight flickering across it as Tony holds down on the hole between your ribs, and you wonder if someday people will find it, the only memory of you left.

You recover slowly, passing the days with a finger in the dust tracing words not yet invented, details as yet unknown, jumbles of scientific formulas and memories of your childhood, frail bits and broken things that were once your life.

Just outside the mouth of the cave you stand, arms spread and hands outstretched, beneath a flock of passenger pigeons so thick they blot out the sky, until the air is nothing but the flapping of wings and their calls. You're somehow strangely small and insignificant, meaningless, as if in an instant you could be wiped away, as extinct as the creatures around you.

That night, you dream of guns and nets, hunters and prey, and both of you long dead.

eight

This is how you comprehend fear, with Nazis all around and he three steps behind you. You bend over, gasping for breath and turn to see the look on his face, the faintest tremor of his mouth, something you'd never notice if you didn't know him better than you know yourself.

You reach, heart doubling, and he coughs, faintly, followed by a choking wheeze as a dribble of blood flows down his chin, as your arms reach and catch him, grabbing handfuls of his sweater as he goes limp against you.

That's how they find you, both hands spread across the gaping hole, fighting to hold back the crimson that seeps through every crack of your fingers, and the taste of bitter acid in your throat every time he draws in air, the stuttering rise and collapse of his chest accompanied by a wet, gurgling sound. He's the one who can't breathe but you're gasping yourself, screaming at partisans with no medical skills to help as you cradle him like a child against you, mentally bargaining _you have nothing_ and pleading _just let him live_ and rationalizing _he's made it through worse_. 

Later, face down, asleep, against his cot, jerking awake to glance at the rise and fall of his chest beneath the layers of bandages, you wish you knew his prayers, had his faith, anything to staunch the fear. But there's nothing.

nine

This is what grief feels like, a hollowness in the center of your chest that stubbornly refuses to be filled, a wound that slowly fills you with blood until air is unable to come and you are left with no memory of anything before the drowning.

He stirs weakly, the persistent fever long faded into a sapping of strength and color, leaving him like dust blown by the wind, frail and faded. He's been ill for longer than you can remember, but you can't measure time anymore, not when your mind wanders and loses all sense of space and time. You no longer bother to ask where you are, and it no longer matters.

"It would be kindest to cut his throat." The man says, accent thick, telling you kindness is the last thing in his mind. He's a burden to them, taking a pointless cut of rations, faint murmurs and groans alerting the enemy to their position. You crouch in front of him like a feral thing, half animal with your clothes dirty and torn, hair long and tangled. You could hiss at him, threaten. But you don't think through the words that escape.

"He's all I have." It comes out as half plea and half resignation, the gasps of the condemned. 

He never answers, hasn't time to move. You feel the Tunnel, an ancient, weary thing, and you don't reach so much as fall across Tony, hand twisted in his sweater, coarse against your cracked skin.

You cannot understand grief. You can only feel it.

ten

No story ends. It bleeds into the next and goes on. But, if you had to choose, this is how your story would close.

You open your eyes to the artificial light of a hospital, to white sheets and an actual bed beneath you, and you think you're dreaming, because you've pictured it so many times before. Ann is there, and she looks a little older, but still so beautiful she takes your breath away. Your hand reaches, instinct overriding logic, feeling for the back against yours, a hand that never holds any warmth since the fever burned away, but there's nothing there.

"Tony." It comes out like a prayer but she answers it as a question.

"Still alive."

You're up before she can hold you down, half running down the halls as she shouts for help, but you've run so long and in far worse condition, and you've found his room long before they catch up with you. In the harsh light of the room, cleaned and wrapped in blankets, he looks even more fragile than he had, as if a breath could blow him away. Scars and scrapes mark all exposed skin, and his body trails wires and tubes, needles and fluid. His eyes are closed, eyelids grey and bruised. You sink into the chair, clutching his arm like a lifeline. You don't say anything, only sit like a statue. The doctors come and try to put you back to bed but eventually give up and move a bed into the room so you'll lie down. You ignore it, hand twisted into the sheet. It feels cold, nothing like the warmth of his sweater, and you think absently that the white is too stark, giving his skin a grey tinge like a dead fish. It makes you sick.

The room is suffocating, the once familiar now monstrous. The world seems far too large after the narrowness of the past or the oddities of the future, and your breath catches with every rasp in his throat.

You should want something, you know. All the time you've spent dreaming of the things you'll have once you get home: familiar food, clean clothes, a hot shower, a warm bed. They seem unimportant and foreign now, luxuries you can't bear to indulge in as if the illusion will shatter. And the other things, words whispered to Ann, visits to a distant cousin you haven't seen in decades, going to see your parents graves and make your peace, all the things you thought you'd rush to do as if running out of time. Now you can't make yourself move. You've lost the ability to live, you realize, and only retained the knowledge of how to survive.

So you stay with what you know, sleeping in a hard-backed chair, picking absently at the food they bring you. You cling to Tony's arm, that will you've poured night after night when you finally gave into sleep, trying to tether him to life in your absence. 

If you can choose an ending, this is what you pick: you open your eyes to another day, to the real world and not a dream, to Ann curled up on the bed the Doctors brought in, and a blanket draped around you, and sunlight pouring like gold through the windows, splashing across the bed and your hands. 

He's still, the rasping gone, face smooth without the lines of pain, and your hand trembles, reaching for the pulse at his throat, and you realize you were never good at happy endings, and there was never any guarantee for both of you to come home, and he was too weak, too ill, and you should have done better, should have tried harder, and.. He twitches, in the same instant you feel the steady flutter of his pulse beneath your fingers, the warmth of living skin. 

And if you were writing your story, you would end it here, the final page of the last chapter, as you feel your muscles relax, bones sag beneath the sudden release of weight borne too long, and finally, at the moment when Tony stirs, blinks, and opens his eyes.


	23. As His Own Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a world where hearts are bought and sold, Doug's is much too small, and Tony's large enough for both of them.

**_As His Own Soul_ **

_"Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness."-Kurt Vonnegut_

The rules are simple. Everyone is born with a heart. Anyone can live without a heart, so long as their birth heart is beating in someone's chest. Anyone can live with another heart, if their own has failed. Hearts may be given, borrowed, stolen, or - most commonly - bought and sold.

His parents are heartless, both of them - his mother because she prefers living without the emotions a heart conjures, to feel the dulled ebb and flow instead of the weight in her chest, and his father because he sold his long ago, too impatient to wait for the better part of his inheritance. It's not a rare thing for two heartless to marry, but it's unusual for them to produce a child, and Doug enters the world with the consequence of that - a heart shriveled and deformed resting uneasily behind his ribs.

The doctor prescribes rest, a peaceful life at the country estate, and his parents all too eagerly shuffle him off to a nanny and out of their minds before he can toddle. When he's eight, a grave-faced doctor with dark-rimmed glasses quietly suggests a replacement to his nanny "if you want the boy to grow up" - hearts of those under eighteen cannot be legally bought, sold, or replaced, but there's a black market, of course, thriving on desperate poor and desperate rich willing to sell a child's heart for a better life for them all, or buy one to give their child a chance at life. But he protests, remembering the summer a little girl, the child of a new maid, fell dead in the middle of the yard, a smile still on her face, because her heart, somewhere in a rich child's chest, was crushed between two moving cars as the boy darted to school. His nanny purses her lips, but respects his decision, and his parents never even learn of the suggestion at all.

It's not so bad at that. He can still feel emotions - at least he thinks he can - even if they seem a little fuzzy around the edges, and he can even love, even if his heart twitches in warning, taxed beyond it's endurance at the prospect.

Halfway across the country and some time later, Tony Newman is born with a heart strong and steady, a bit too large and heavy for his chest. "A good heart." The doctor says with a smile. "Big enough for two boys." And his parents laugh, tearfully, grateful.

They grow up, both of them, Doug against the odds, and the science skills in both their hearts turns them toward Project Tic Toc, and a Tunnel in the middle of nowhere. They read each other's files the day Tony joins, and Doug raises an eyebrow at a heart that size in a single chest, even as some of the other scientists mutter disparaging comments about Doug's - being heartless out of choice is one thing, but someone like him is different.

Tony is..strange, he thinks, with that oversized heart and no judgement in his dark gaze, and he finds that the heart in his own chest warms slightly to the man's unabashed offer of friendship, the genuine lack of pity in his smile.

He doesn't think when he goes after him on the Titanic, because if he had a real heart, he thinks he would call Tony the closest thing to a friend he's ever had, and so he runs with him, that day, and the days after, chasing time from one place to the next, because Tony deserves to get back home, to use that heart for something great.

A shell blast stops that huge heart in the midst of the Civil War, and Doug hovers, hands inches above him, uncertain of where to touch, what to do. Ann must be watching, because a jolt, and then another one comes through the Tunnel, but it's not enough to stabilize the damage, because there's so much heart in Tony Newman's chest, and all of it is horribly still and silent.

Doug doesn't hesitate. He reaches into his chest, between ribs and muscles, and pulls it out, that shriveled, ugly little thing that's blessedly beating when Tony's isn't, and if it can help at all, if he can make it work, just this once, he'll never complain about it again. He pushes it, with a bit too much strength, and a little less gently than he should, letting it fall like a lead weight against Tony's heart. And Tony twitches, coughs, and flutters back to life, that tiny little support system jump starting his own heart.

Doug's chest feels hollow, his limbs fuzzy and cold, like a drug dripping into his veins, but he pushes Tony's hands away when he tries to return the heart.

"Keep it." He says quietly. "Until yours is stable."

He's selfish, in a way, he thinks, because part of him imagines that his heart will change, like a cocoon to a butterfly, expand and grow strong in the presence of the warmth and strength of Tony's heart, and he aches for just a little of that.

Tony keeps it a week, than hands it back, during a blizzard in Colorado when Doug can't stop shaking, and Tony's face is pinched with fright, but so much warmer than Doug's, powered by that heart.

Tony cradles it, using both palms, even though it fits easily into one, and Doug pushes it back in himself with only a faintly bitter glance. His heart stutters nervously, as if it's forgotten the amount of space in his chest, the empty room it can't fill. It's no larger or stronger, and he feels an irrational urge to apologize for the sight of it, even when Tony's eyes glimmer with gratitude, and he's appallingly grateful himself that there was enough life in his flicker of a heartbeat to save Tony's heart.

Of this, he's certain. The world needs Tony's heart, that goodness, that warmth, and kindness. The world doesn't need his.

It's a matter of time, in the end, a ticking, slowing bomb, worsened by the share, by the constant warp and weft of time, but it's a surprise, even so, when his heart gives out in the midst of a Russian ballet performance. They'd been stuck there for two months, and taken a job moving props and setting up the lamps, and he thinks he's laughing at something Tony said, when there's a sharp pain across his chest, and he's on his back staring at the ceiling, unable to remember why all the breath has left his lungs. 

His heart gives a final, apologetic twitch, and it's silent, and he's gone before awareness sets in, before he knows what happened.

His eyes fly open, as he gulps for air. His chest is weighted, something pressing against his ribs, and it's far too heavy, far too _much_. Tony's face swims into focus, and he's - crying? why is he crying? - and so visibly relieved that for an instant Doug thinks they must have made it home, until the ropes of the backstage room swim into view, and he realizes that it's still turn of the century Russia, and nothing has changed.

He sits up, slowly, and Tony reaches to help him with a single hand, prop him against a chair. He glances down, noting something cradled in Tony's other palm - his heart, still and dead-looking - and he's even more confused.

"How...?" He rubs his chest, and his heart thumps heavily - his heart never sounded like that before - and it's nearly deafening, enough to stop him cold. And then he's clawing at his chest, as Tony drops the old heart in time to stop him from pulling out the new.

"It's okay." Tony says, when he's pinned his arms to his side, slightly out of breath and frantic. "The beat jumps a little sometimes, and I know it's too big, but it.." He trails off.

"You gave me your heart." Doug's voice is numb, and he's feeling...he's feeling, and it's strange and overwhelming, and is this what people, normal people feel like all the time, like the world is too large and his heart, even one this big can't seem to contain it? "Why?"

"To save your life." Tony's voice sounds the same, and he doesn't even know how that's possible, because lacking a heart is supposed to make you dulled and cold, and Tony sounds anything but, a mixture of fear and happiness that he's too overwhelmed to process.

"Why?" He repeats, numbly, all he can manage for now, and this time Tony looks like he's going to cry again, and Doug knows for certain that that is impossible without a heart, and yet he's doing it.

"You did the same for me once."

"Not the same." Doug's eyes shift to the miserable looking heart on the floor, but Tony's eyes don't follow.

"Not just that." Tony's voice is gentle. "All the times you've kept me going, given up everything to keep me safe. Even following me in the first place. We're family, why wouldn't I give you my heart to save you?"

And like that, Doug's eyes are wet, too - he hates and loves this heart, he thinks, because he knows for sure he's never cried before - but no one has ever cared about him before, he's never mattered to anyone before, and Tony must take that as a cue that he's not going to claw the heart out now, because he lets go of his arms and pulls him into a hug. This is family, Doug's mind says softly, but aloud. "Thank you." He feels Tony nod.

They come back home, finally, ten years and two weeks after the day they entered the Tunnel, and the newspaper cover it, all, even as the psychologists and scientific papers study them with curiosity, considering the idea that perhaps there are many things the world has gotten wrong for too long. Tony lives, heartless, and it doesn't seem to alter or bother him in any way, still full of life and emotions. Doug keeps his heart, safe and sound, and if the papers mistake them for brothers, for twins, even, they only smile and don't correct them.

The rules are simple. Everyone is born with a heart. Anyone can live without a heart, so long as their birth heart is beating in someone's chest. Anyone can live with another heart, if their own has failed. Hearts may be bought, sold, borrowed, stolen, or - most notably - freely given.


End file.
